Food With Full Attention

A Critique of the Report: “Productive Neighborhoods”

2012-01-17T15:04:00.000-08:00

Recently, I received a report about urban agricultureefforts in Seattle. This report is entitled ProductiveNeighborhoods: A Case Study Based Exploration of Seattle Urban AgricultureProspects. The authors are Magdelena Celinska, Jason Henry and RachaelMeyer and this was a 2011 summer internship project for the Berger Partnership.The idea of urban agriculture is very important right now since the carbonfootprint of small-scale farmers from outlying counties driving produce tometro areas is similar to the carbon footprint of produce delivered by semisfrom 1500 miles away. (See my previous posts on this topic.) There has alsobeen quite a bit of buzz on this topic over the last couple of years and urbanfarms have a high “coolness” factor. If you want to read this report you candownload it here: http://www.bergerpartnership.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Productive-Neighborhoods-Report-low-res.pdf

This report makes some salient points, but I have majordisagreements with some of the assumptions and conclusions. As with mostattempts by mainstream businesses to address structural problems, they sufferfrom a lack of perspective. The modern business model is based on tweakingelements of the status quo. There is no postmodern analysis and no alternativetheory to “the same old same old” even discussed. Some examples follow.

Here is a quote from page 5 of the report: “However, in order for urban agriculture totake hold as a lasting model for food production, it must transition into thecommercial food supply system and become a competitive option.” This is anassumption masquerading as a conclusion. It shows up after a minimal discussionof Victory Gardens and the WIN program of Gerald Ford’s presidency. Per thereport, Victory Gardens produced 40% of America’s vegetables in 1943 from 20million gardens. In 1940, there were 35 million households in the US (http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005055.html),so 57% of households during the war years would have had Victory Gardens.

The report also notes 49% of US households grew vegetable gardensduring Ford’s WIN (Whip Inflation Now) program in the mid-1970’s. In otherwords, it was relatively easy to get half of US households motivated again togrow some of their own food, even though gardening had declined after World WarII. Since the oil shocks of the 1970’s the number of gardens trended downwards andthe report notes the percentage of US households with gardens had declined to 22% by 2006(page 5). However, it is easy to imagine another oil shock, or similar publictrauma, could lead to a significant increase in household gardens. Therefore, itdoes not follow that growing food for households need be part of the commercialfood supply system. This is simply an assumption based on a vested interest inseeing small-scale food production shoehorned into a corporate competitivesystem where the deck is stacked against the small grower.

Here is a quote from page 9: “The typologies are organized around the relationships between thefarmer and the consumer.” The use of typologies is usually dismissed in thesocial sciences as fuzzy thinking and these typologies betray an anti-farmerbias that is unfortunately the norm in the modern business model. Thesetypologies are not driven by what the farmer needs, but rather what theconsumer desires (cheap food being the primary driver). A better scheme might be a paradigmatic classification based on size of the farm and/ortechnology used. In other words a bottom-up classification based on objectivemeasures, rather than a top-down classification based on subjective pre-conceivednotions that focus on the consumer rather than the farmer.

Here is a quote from page 13: “It is important to recognize that in terms of carbon footprint thelargest carbon ‘hit’ is at the end of the distribution route. In other words,more energy is used getting a crop from the grocery store to the table than ittakes to get a crop from the field to a store.” This is spot on and a veryimportant point. To put this into a local perspective, if you look at my fossilfuel use for 2011, I used 13.25 gallons of fuel to grow enough food to meet thecalorie requirements of 2.79 people on a 2000 calorie diet and 2.23 people on a2500 calorie diet. Yet I used 210 gallons of gasoline to drive 5,094miles in 2011 (including car and truck). Only 620 miles of that was farmbusiness and the rest (4,474 miles) was just to haul myself around – the samething most of you do every day. Even though I make a conscious effort torestrict my driving and drive far fewer miles than the average American, mypersonal gasoline use dwarfs the amount of fossil fuels that actuallygoes for a productive purpose. In light of this revelation, many readers maysurmise that the amount of gas used on farms is not even worth worrying about –and they make a good point, just as the report does. The energy wasted byAmericans driving to the store and driving to work and driving Junior to soccerpractice and just driving for fun are the real culprits in America’s HUGE wasteof energy. This is a systemic problem and we cannot do very much about it.However, once the formerly cheap gasoline has risen in price to the level wherewe cannot afford to drive unless absolutely necessary, what alternatives willbe in place for our food supply? Not very many if we do not constructalternatives NOW. That is why we need to develop low-energyalternatives. The ProductiveNeighborhoods report addresses a real need, as exemplified by this astute quote, but they miss the boat by sticking with the modern business modelthat got us into trouble in the first place.

Here is a quote from page 45: “In order to produce a significant chanage to the conventional foodsystem, urban farms must happen on a large scale.” This is anotherassumption that is not only unwarranted but dangerous. As noted earlier in thereport, 57% of US households had Victory Gardens and 49% had WIN gardens.Clearly, it is NOT necessary to have a large-scale urban agricultural movementin order to feed people. Nor does it follow that, “In order to impact and shift toward a balanced and sustainable foodsystem, urban farms must function on a larger scale within our neighborhoods(page 57).” In point of fact, thestatistics included in this report refute these two assumptions.

The following is a spreadsheet table I put together usingthe statistics from the farms noted in the report (pp.21-49). There was noconsistency in statistics presented so I extrapolated some numbers from what wasincluded. For instance, a normal growing season in the Pacific Northwest is 35weeks (8 months), so some of the hours worked per week use this calculationwhen only the total hours are given. Also, in the case of Marra Farm, a fulltime equivalent (FTE) of 1.0 person, or 2000 hours, was added to the 7200volunteer hours to account for the part-time help. If 2.0 FTE is used, the efficiency in terms of foodproduced per hour would be even lower. To provide a comparison, I usedstatistics from my own farm (F.A. Farm 2011) and the food bank farm I managedlast year (2010).

Farm/Company	Sq Ft	% Acre	Hr/Wk	Total Hr	Hr/A/Wk	Cost	Cost/Acre	Lb Food	Lb / Acre	Cost / Lb
City Grown Wallingford	5,200	12%	20	700	168	$ 1,500	$ 12,565
Magic Bean	20,000	46%	40	1,400	87	$ 4,000	$ 8,712
City Art Farm	900	2%				$ 500	$ 24,200
Marra Farm	43,560	100%	263	9,200	263	$65,000	$ 65,000	22,000	22,000	$ 2.95
Alleycat Acres	2,500	6%	49	1,700	846	$15,000	$261,360	822	14,323	$ 18.25
Transitional Resources	4,000	9%	8	280	87
UW & SYGW Partnership	32,670	75%				$15,000	$ 20,000	3,750	5,000	$ 4.00
SYGW	10,890	25%	160	5,600	640			1,250	5,000
Solefood (in Vancouver)	21,780	50%						10,000	20,000
YWCA Vancouver	7,000	16%	43	1,500	267			980	6,098
Bastille Rooftop Garden	800	2%						1,800	98,010

F.A. Farm 2011	41,250	95%	57	2,000	60	$ 3,505	$ 3,701	9,330	9,852	$ 0.38
Food Bank Farm 2010	8,674	20%	23	600	116	$10,000	$ 50,219	3,762	18,892	$ 2.66

Even a cursory glance at this table is quite revealing.Notice how the hours per acre per week (Hr/A/Wk) ranges from 60 on my farm to846 for Alleycat Acres. Since the lowest Hr/A/Wk comes from a farm that is 95%of an acre and the highest Hr/A/Wk comes from a farm only 6% of an acre, wemight expect a negative correlation between size and hours per acre per week.(This would be a measure of efficiencies of scale.) This is indeed true, butthe correlation is only -32.5% so size does not seem to be significant.

Another question may be whether size is correlated with poundsof food per acre (Lb/Acre). In other words, as acreage increases, we shouldexpect an increase in pounds per acre (another measure of efficiencies ofscale). In this case the correlation is negative and only -36.1%, so size againdoes not seem to be significant. It should be noted that the negativecorrelation here indicates that even at small scales, increasing acreagedecreases efficiency, but that is another topic. Because the correlation is notsignificant, it only points in a direction for further study.

Of course there are caveats to this small sample size, aswell as the the wisdom of not putting too much stock in correlations. However,the report assumes scaling up production will provide more efficiency, but thereport’s own data (with the addition of my two farm data sets) show increasedscale does not improve production nor lower time significantly. This is animportant point.

Urban agriculture has great potential to solve about half ofthe problem of getting fresh food to city dwellers, as the example of theVictory and WIN gardens show. However, this is not likely to come from scalingup production and mimicing current business practices. It should be noted thatsmall-scale farmers who sell in metro markets do so by using fossil fuel energyin similar amounts to mainstream trucking companies that deliver tosupermarkets. Many mainstream economists have pointed this out. This is not analternative for the future and is simply aping the corporate business model,where a business takes advantage of whatever infrastructure is available.

The real alternative for the future is to build on theVictory and WIN garden model and get more and more of the city dwellers to growtheir own food. This means encouraging and even giving tax breaks for backyard(and frontyard!) gardens, using vacant lots, overruling covenants thatdiscourage gardening, allowing city dwellers to use sidewalk and median strips,and generally unblocking the huge bias towards grass and concrete in favor offood production. Simply trying to fit small-scale gardeners into the modernbusiness model is not likely to make any real improvement in the ability of cities tofeed themselves.

One last point. Will Allen, who has worked for severalyears setting up urban gardens in Milwaukee, recently mentioned on an NPR radioprogram that the retail sales of their extensive urban market gardens onlyprovide 15% of their revenue. The rest of the money to keep the programs goinghas to come from grants and contributions. This is not a good model for thefuture. Nor is trying to shoehorn small-scale agriculture into a modernbusiness model that favors corporate business at the expense of the environmentand the small-scale grower. A better alternative is to encourage everyone togrow 5-15% of their food right now.

How Much Food Can I Grow With Minimal Fossil Fuel Inputs?

2012-01-07T13:33:00.000-08:00

One of the essentials to planning for post-peak oil, post-collapse America is to figure out how much food a person can actually grow with minimal fossil fuel inputs and mostly hand labor. Since agriculture is so important, it is likely you will be able to get some gasoline, even if it comes to rationing. In other words, will you be able to get 5-10 gallons of gasoline with your ration book or on the black market over the course of a year? The odds are good. With this small amount of gasoline and a walk-behind tiller, you will be able to grow plenty of food IF you are an efficient worker.

Efficiency means working smarter, not harder. My dad was a hard worker, but at the age of 53, he was cleaning barns one day and came into the house. He said, "I don't feel good. I think I'll lay down for awhile." Then he lay down and died. (He was having his third heart attack.) Two of my brothers worked themselves to death too. Since I am trying not to repeat the family pattern, it is important to me to work smarter, not harder. Am I being successful in working more efficiently? Let's look at the numbers.

In the last four years, from 2008 to 2011, I have been able to decrease my working hours from 3000 per year to 2000, a decrease of 33%. I have been able to decrease my fuel use from 27.5 gallons of gasoline to 13.25 gallons, a decrease of 52%. I have also increased my kilocalories per acre per hour from 740 in 2008 to 1076 in 2011, a 45% increase. How have I been able to increase the rate at which I produce food while simultaneously reducing my hours worked and reducing my fuel use? By working smarter, not harder. For another look at this idea you can go to my previous blog "Decreasing Fuel Use and Increasing Efficiency."

You can calculate the efficiency of getting electricity to your home very simply. If a power plant is 30% efficient, for example, and the power grid itself is 40% efficient, then the efficiency of the electrical system that provides you with lights is 12% (.30 x .40 = .12 = 12%). Now, using that same logic, if I am gaining efficiency because I produce more with less, I can divide my efficiency percentages to arrive at a rough measure of my efficiency gains. So . . . -.33 /-.52 / .45 = 1.41. Does this mean I am 1.41 times more efficient than I was in 2008? Yes it does.

[Disclaimer: I get some volunteer help on the farm occasionally, but never more than 5-10% of my own hours. My total hours worked each year includes these volunteer hours. Also, I am not just growing high kilocalorie items to skew the data. I grow some grain and beans, but I grow 70-90 kinds of food each year.]

Those who know me are aware I am no buffed athlete. In fact I am a little on the roly-poly side and am 62 years old. I calculate my labor at 125 kilocalories per hour because I don't grunt and strain all day long. I work at a moderate pace and rarely crack a sweat. The emphasis is on doing tasks rather than working. This is the key to efficiency. Just as you get into a rhythm when you are biking 40 miles or walking 10 miles, so you can get into a rhythm while you work.

The upshot of my work is providing a vision of how we are going to thrive, not just survive, in the post-peak, post-collapse world. We will have to work at manual labor, but our tasks need not be onerous. Nor do we have to make bad bargains with nature and use ever more fossil fuels and dangerous biotech seeds. The answer is very simple. It is to use minimal amounts of fossil fuels and mostly hand labor. Applying the hand labor more efficiently really makes the system work.

Addendum: I did a three-part series of courses for Whatcom Folk School last year on "Sustainable Agriculture From the Ground Up." I will probably do so again in 2012. You can also come out to the farm and do volunteer work in order to learn efficient farming methods. The work is not onerous and you get food to eat.

Decreasing Fuel Use and Increasing Efficiency

2012-01-06T16:30:00.000-08:00

Over the last four years, I kept track of my fuel use for my tiller (I don't have a tractor). I also decreased my full time hours from approximately 3000 hours in 2008 and 2009, to 2500 hours in 2010 and 2000 hours in 2011. Over this period, I cut my fuel use in half but increased the amount of food I can grow (740 kilocalories per acre per hour in 2008 to 1,076 kilocalories per acre per hour in 2011 - a 45% increase). Average yield during this period was 11,051 pounds of food with an energy value of 2.32 million kilocalories on 1.14 acres.

The line graph below shows this trend. In order to compact the graph I divided the hours by 100. For those of you who prefer a log scale, I have provided that on the second graph. It shows the same thing.

Notice how the index of kilocalories food to kilocalories fuel runs parallel to the index of kilocalories food to total kilocalories. [Total kilocalories = my hours at 125 kcal/hour + gallons of gas at 31,000 kcal/gal.] This is very interesting. Since the numerators are the same, the denominators are the ones changing. Yet the indices maintain the same relationship, which we can see in the similarities between the yellow and the blue lines on the graph. [We can see it even more clearly in the log scale graph below.]

Now, since the relative relationships remain the same while fuel use decreases, the only variable that could take up the slack in keeping the relationships the same is my human labor. In other words, I am getting more efficient in my human labor, even as I decrease my fuel use.

This is the kind of efficiency I have been striving for and the basis of my sustainable model. As we are forced to get by with fewer and fewer fossil fuel inputs, we need to increase our human labor efficiency to take up the slack. This takes time to learn. Even though I grew up on a farm and worked as a migrant laborer for 8 years and have been growing produce and grain here for 8 years now, I get more efficient every year.

Addendum: 2010 and 2011 were both poor years weatherwise. Nevertheless, my 2011 index of output/input was 3.08, the same as 2009, when the weather was better. You might also note that I produced 3.08 kilocalories of food energy for every kilocalorie of labor and gas input. Compare this to the 7-10 kilocalories it takes to produce 1 kilocalorie of food energy in industrial agriculture.

A Modest Proposal for Free CSA Shares

2011-12-26T18:20:00.000-08:00

It should be obvious to most people that the growth economy and the money system don’t work very well. The people at the top, whether rich or powerful or both, have all they want and the people at the bottom don’t have what they need. The same pattern can be seen locally, nationally and internationally. Poor people on the street are in the same boat as poor countries. They don’t get what they need, while the rich are buying up everything, simply because they have the money to do so.

The time is past to look for solutions within the same systems that are channeling all the resources towards the rich. Governments and corporations are more than happy to promise solutions while simultaneously driving us to doom and death. We need to build local alternatives that take care of ourselves. One alternative that uses a historical/anthropological approach is the gift economy. In our modern industrialized world, a gift is something that incurs no responsibility to reciprocate and does nothing to enhance solidarity. A gift economy, on the other hand, uses gifts to bind up everyone in the society through obligation. It is a total system and worked quite well in Melanesia and right here in the Pacific Northwest. The Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski described the nature of precise gift exchange in his book Argonauts of the Western Pacific in 1922, but it was the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss who first analyzed the gift economy as a total system. His seminal work was published in 1950 and the English translation is called The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (1990, translation W. D. Halls). I recommend this book highly. Those of you who took anthropology in college probably know of Malinowski’s work.

I am sure that many of you reading this post are skeptical, but that is just fine by me. Skepticism is fine, snotty rejoinders based on self-serving rapaciousness are not. In order for real solutions to work, they need to be tried. The gift economy can start small and at a local level. The first place to start is with the food system. Here is one alternative.

FREE CSA SHARES
I have been growing food for seven years using techniques that are beyond organic and sustainable. Every year I put in between 2000 to 3000 unpaid hours and give away thousands of dollars in food. This year I am offering free CSA (community supported agriculture) shares to low-income families. The season runs 18 weeks and pickup is on the farm. Pickup days will be Wednesday, from 4-6 pm and possibly Mondays and Fridays at the same time. Here is how you can help:

1) Send me names of people (Whatcom County, Washington only) who could use a free CSA share. Include contact info, like street addresses, email addresses (if applicable), phone numbers, and where they would be able to pick up their share if they cannot get out to the farm on pickup days. I will be vetting and selecting the people who get a share and my decision is final.

2) Sign up to pickup shares for this program. Since I am growing the food to give away, I am NOT going to take even more time out of my day to deliver. If you sign up to contribute your time and gas to pick up, you MUST be responsible. No excuses.

3) Contribute to the cost of these shares. You can write me a check (made out to Walter Haugen) or even send me cash in an envelope. This plan will be run without any governmental nonsense, so you will NOT be able to take a tax deduction for your contribution. I am contributing a gift to people who need food and you will be contributing a gift to me. Here is my address:
Walter Haugen
5890 Barr Road
Ferndale, WA 98248

This is going to be a no-nonsense program and extend what I have already been doing for several years now. There are no overhead costs and all contributions go towards paying the farmer for produce. If this program takes off, I already have plenty of other farmers lined up to fill an ever-expanding niche. Based on my experience at food bank farms and starting farmers markets, I feel this is a program that can work well, both right now and for the postmodern world into which we are transitioning.

DISCLAIMER: If you are a government or corporate employee and you don’t like my anti-government and anti-corporate bias, don’t bother me with your complaints and criticisms. Just hit the Delete button.

Update on Triticale

2011-05-20T08:55:00.001-07:00

My triticale is heading already. This is surprising, given that we have had such a wet spring. The ditches were running with water just a week ago, similar to what we normally get in February. Most of the farmers around here are just getting into their fields. Since I am on a human scale, rather than a tractor scale, I was able to plant some things in the small windows of dryness we got in the last month. My potatoes are up and looking good. My cabbage, broccoli and onions likewise.

Triticale is part of my ongoing grain project. We need to grow our own grain on small plots, especially if we are cutting, threshing and winnowing by hand, as I am. Without mechanized combines, no farmer will be able to grow grain at current prices, which are quite low compared to the labor involved in hand cultivation and harvesting. I became interested in triticale when I was teaching anthropology for a couple of quarters because it is a polyploid (more than two sets of chromosomes), like most of our domestic crops. Triticale is a man-made crop, with four sets of 7 chromosomes from wheat and two sets of 7 from rye. This becomes a chromosome number of 42 (6 x 7), the same as common wheat. Triticale also has a larger grain than wheat and a nice golden color like wheat and unlike rye. I also suspected it would open up the soil like rye, which is known as the "biological tractor."

I got a generic variety of winter triticale from Fedco, which sells it as a cover crop. I sowed it September 29, 2009 and last year, I harvested some for seed and a test bread loaf, and then whacked down the rest of it. It reseeded and came back like gangbusters. When I made my test loaves, I quite liked the taste. The loaves weren’t as flat as straight rye, so there seems to be enough gluten to make a good coarse loaf – the kind I make for our own use.

The reseeding is another part of my grain project. I am harvesting some grain, like my winter wheat, and then watching as it reseeds, due to my primitive cutting with a sickle. So far, this works well. I also left a plot of spelt last year and whacked down one half and let the other half stand. The half that was whacked down reseeded quite nicely, but the half left to stand tall didn't reseed well. It may be that whacking down the stems protects the seed, but I take the stems off the wheat when I cut it, so this might not be determinative. On the other hand, I don't cut my wheat right down to the ground like a mechanical combine, so maybe some of the stem that is left allows the seed to be protected until it sprouts (as long as I whack it down).

For comparison, the winter wheat I sowed October 29, 2010 is doing well, but nowhere near as well as the triticale left to reseed. The winter wheat I left to reseed is about the same height as what I planted, so it is not the technique that is determinative, but the grain itself. In other words, triticale holds out great potential for a grain crop when our weather is cooler in the spring. As the medieval peasants did, it is good to plant spelt as well as wheat as a hedge against hunger. It seems we can also add triticale to the mix.

125 Calories in a Bottle of Guinness

2011-05-12T10:51:00.000-07:00

As I finished a book this morning, I happened to notice my bookmark. It was a tag from a six-pack of Guinness draught I bought some time ago. In big white and gold letters it said "Guinness only has 125 calories." Since I have repeatedly assessed my work rate on the farm at 125 calories per hour, I was immediately intrigued.

As you know, I assess my farm work based on a 2500 calorie a day diet. Since I put out as much energy as I consume, i.e. I am neither putting on nor losing weight, my energy output per day is the amount I eat. The national average for men is 2500 calories per day, so I start with this figure. A good average for the amount of calories burned in 8 hours of sleep is 500, which leaves 2000 calories for a day's work. Since I work at a variable rate all day long, including a nap, making food and eating it, doing computer work and doing manual labor, I use an average over a 16-hour day. 2000 calories divided by 16 hours is 125 calories per hour. Simple, easy to calculate AND valid once you actually look at human work with an unbiased eye. Even in construction work, there are times of extreme effort, but also a considerable amount of time in setup, breakdown, shooting the breeze with other workers, listening to the boss blather on about codes and workrates, etc. You might also notice that most people spend as much effort on their leisure time or duties at home as they do at work. Thus, I regard 125 calories as a valid rate for human work over the long haul and across the majority of jobs.

So if my work is worth 125 calories per hour and there are 125 calories in a 12-ounce bottle of draught Guinness, then a bottle should be worth one hour of my time. If I was paid a minimum wage for farm work (which I am not, by the way), then a bottle of Guinness would be worth $8.67 here in Washington state. This is about the price for a six-pack however, so a minimum wage worker is getting 6 times the food calories he is using to work. Another way to look at it would be to ask how many bottles a minimum-wage worker could get in a bar. At current prices, a bottle of Guinness is about $4.50 for a bottle, so a minimum-wage worker can get about 2 times the food calories he is using to work. By the way, this 3:1 ratio comports well with the standard 3:1 ratio a bar owner needs to charge to make a profit, so the merchant, or trade, aspect of Guinness calories fits into the modern business model. However, there is still a disconnect between the retail price of Guinness and the minimum wage. Does this disconnect mean that a minimum wage worker is overpaid or does it mean that the Guinness is underpriced in terms of the energy in the actual product?

It is actually neither. The real disconnect is that price is disconnected from energy value. For most economists, price and energy value are like apples and oranges - not comparable. However, if we knowingly disconnect from price by not using money, then we can utilize energy as our measurement of value. Once we make this "conscious" disconnect, we can value the Guinness at its calorie value or even leverage the idea of this disconnect to look at economics from a different perspective.

So, are you willing to come out to the farm and work an hour for a bottle of Guinness? Probably not. You may object, and rightly so, that we need to leverage the energy value in our "reward" or "wage." After all, we are trying to use human energy calories to produce MORE than we consume. [Sidebar: Even though modern agriculture uses more input calories in fossil fuels than it produces in food calories, one of the tenets of postmodern agriculture is that we produce more food calories than our human and fossil fuel inputs.] Therefore, I should give you more than a bottle of Guinness for your time (let's forget where I get the money to buy the Guinness for the moment). Okay, fair enough. Would you be willing to come out to the farm and work an hour for two bottles of Guinness? Now you might be tempted, especially if you were desparate and did not drink the Guinness but just took them home and traded them to someone. Perhaps you worked for 3 hours and got a six-pack of Guinness and then traded it for two packs of cigarettes, which you then traded for a gallon of gas, and then you used your car to take someone to the store and on other errands, and this taxi service was paid for with a bunch of food either purchased or grown by the person who did not have a car. At the end of the day, you have leveraged your minimal labor input into more than you could get by just drinking the beverage.

So, my brief simplistic scenario above is really a microcosm of how basic economics works - i.e. householder economics. It is also how the "ghetto" economy, or "underground" economy works. It is all about leverage AND it takes interaction. When you see people on the street corner just hanging out, they are really doing more work than you, at your computer in your cubicle, are doing. The key is leverage and interaction.

Okay, can we codify the trade aspect of the underground economy and bring it up aboveground? Yes, and it is tres simple. We simply use scrip. Scrip is just a piece of paper that lists a value for barter transactions. For example, the scrip in Ferndale is the Steiner. A Steiner is worth either 1) an hour of your time, 2) 5 pounds of potatoes, 3) 2 dozen eggs, or 4) 2 pints of beer. The important point in using these 4 commodities is not that they are equivalent, but that they give you four frames of reference for your transaction. You could come up with your own similar scrip scheme. When you make a trade you are engaging in a bilateral contract and you need to have a way to compare your product/service with the other product/service. Money usually serves for settling the transaction BUT money is politically loaded and for many people it is hard to come by. Time and interaction however, are what the poor have in abundance. Thus the trade aspect of the underground economy.

As wages go down and unemployment goes up, dealing with the money system becomes harder and harder. Embracing the underground economy and bringing it up for air by using scrip is a viable way to get an edge AND build community. Community-building is really an offshoot of human interaction. Trade, not just purchasing, is an easy way to build community.

Throwing Away 4 Out of 5 Beers

2011-04-23T10:46:00.000-07:00

Let's put the difference between energy input and output into an analogy everyone can understand. Suppose you go to your favorite pub and order 5 pints of beer. The bartender puts them up on the bar and you proceed to drink 1 and pour the other 4 out into the nearest sink. After you drink your beer you say, "I'm still thirsty," and order 5 more. Once again, you pour 4 down the sink and drink 1. At the end of your pint you decide to go home. As you pay for your pint you notice that it takes $40 to pay for your pints, instead of the usual $8. Nevertheless you pay for your beer, tip the bartender and get into your automobile which is powered by an internal combustion engine that is just as wasteful as your behavior in the bar. On the drive home you ponder just what "20% efficiency" really means.

Insisting we get more work done by using internal combustion engines without factoring in how much energy is wasted AND refusing to consider where the wasted heat and gases go is an example of puerile thought processes. Ditto for willfully confusing input and output. When we burn fossil fuels we burn up calories. When we walk around and dig ditches and weed carrots and sit in front of a computer, we burn up calories. Since I have delineated my methodology several times on this blog, I won't repeat it here. What I will say is that you burn up around 2500 calories a day for a US male and around 2000 for a US female. If you grow some food with your calories, you get a much better return on the energy invested than if you sit behind the wheel of your car or in front of your computer. In the future, when the real cost of energy will be accounted for in the marketplace, you will realize that deep in your heart and in your hands.

Something Simple to Think About

2011-04-18T15:04:00.000-07:00

There have been several comments on how much energy is in a litre of petrol since I first questioned Rob Hopkins’ comparison of 1 litre of petrol to 35 days of hard human manual labor. It is amazing to me how many people still confuse input with output. Allow me to make a few simple points.

It takes energy to do anything.
When you use energy, you generate heat and waste products.
An engine is regarded as efficient if it produces work output equal to 20% of its work input. This is the standard for the internal combustion engine.
Since the internal combustion engine only gives back 20% of the energy it consumes, 80% of the energy is wasted as heat and gases.
These gases go into the atmosphere. The heat does too.
This warms up the planet.
For every bit of work you are doing with an internal combustion engine, you are wasting 4 times as much energy that is going into the atmosphere.
A power plant produces energy equal to 30% of its input as a rule.
The electrical power grid has an efficiency rating of 40%, so the actual power that gets to you is only 12% of the energy you use to fire up the power plant.
When you use an internal combustion engine you waste 80% of the energy. When you use electric power to toast your bagel in the morning, you are wasting 88% of the energy.
All discussion about how the output is used to do work is irrelevant because of the GIGANTIC waste of energy when using fossil fuels as an energy source.
What you do with the output is your business. What you do with the 80-88% waste is everyone’s business.
All discussions about fitness levels and who can pedal a generator faster or for how much longer are irrelevant to the energy content of a litre of petrol.

More Analysis of Internal Energy in a Litre of Petrol

2011-04-17T15:00:00.000-07:00

In regards to Rob Hopkins’ claim of “1 litre of petrol equaling 35 days of hard manual human labor,” I looked at his source, which is FEASTA, The Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability. (Thanks to David McLeod of Transition Whatcom for pointing this out to me.) Here is the website link and the relevant paragraphs, which evidently date from 2007: http://www.feasta.org/documents/energy/emissions2007.htm

The energy in a kilogram of oil is equivalent to the output of about 24 working days or just under 200 hours of human work. That makes a day's human work equal to about 40 grams of oil, a couple of desert-spoons full. Another way of looking at it is that a 40 litre fill-up at a petrol station is the equivalent of about four years of human manual work.

Put another way, if an averagely fit person pedaled a generator, they could light a 70 watt bulb though their efforts. This means that, for every hour that they spent in continuous physical labour, they could achieve 3,600 x 70 Joules of work. (A watt is a joule per second - so a 'watt hour' is calculated from the number of seconds in the hour, which is 3,600.) 3,600 seconds x 70 Joules is 252,000 J per hour, the amount the average worker could achieve.

There are no references for FEASTA’s claims and there is a major theoretical problem in their calculations. If we take the first claim of 200 hours of human work for 40 grams of oil, we don’t know whether they mean crude oil or diesel or gasoline. Presumably they mean diesel or gasoline (which are not equivalent in mass, by the way) since they mention a 40 litre fill-up at a gas station. They also state the 40 litres as equivalent to about four years of human work. At 2000 hours per year that calculates to 8000 hours for 40 litres, or 200 hours of work per litre. If we divide this by an 8-hour day, that means a litre of petrol would be equal to 25 days of human manual labor. If Rob is using this method of calculation, he simply made a math error. (The paragraph above actually states 24 days, which is probably because they didn’t round up to 200 hours in their original calculations.)

If, on the other hand we look at the second method of calculating human work used by FEASTA, we quickly uncover their theoretical error. They first postulate “an averagely fit person” pedaling a generator that lights a 70 watt bulb. Their actual calculations are spot on and I appreciate their conversion to 252,000 joules per hour, which is the preferred unit for thermochemical energy. However since there are 4184 joules in a kilocalorie, this calculates to 60.22 kilocalories per hour for the human pedaling the generator and lighting up the 70-watt bulb. [Note: I will use kilocalories for the calculations in this post rather than the usual shorthand of calories.] For those of you following closely, you may already see that FEASTA is focusing solely on the work done (the light bulb) and NOT the energies used by the sweaty human to get the work done. This is a major theoretical problem, as it confuses input with output.

In one of my classes in high school, the instructor had the class tough guy come up and push against his desk, which was attached to the floor. Of course the desk didn’t move. The teacher then flicked his pencil a couple of times and said that he was doing more work than the tough guy grunting and straining against an immovable object. Of course he was right, as work is generally accepted as getting something done, like moving a block of stone or digging up dirt with a shovel. However, the work in this case is a measure of output, not input. In addition to the work done by pedaling the generator or move the block of stone or dig the soil, we have to take into account the energy used to keep the engine going, like the energy to contract the muscles or make the wheel go around in the first place. If electric power plants operate at a thermal efficiency of 30% and a car operates at a thermal efficiency of 21%, we know we have a 70% and 79% waste of energy in the form of heat when we run these engines. We get the same result in a human that is reflected in a higher heart rate and the sweat running down the face of the human who is pedaling the generator to light up the 70 watt bulb. In other words, we cannot discount the energy that goes into powering the light bulb that is “wasted” as heat. This is the same kind of fiction that economists use to baldly state that industrial agriculture is a more efficient way to grow food, all the while blithely ignoring the much greater quantities of energy used to power the big tractors to grow the food and the inputs of energy to make the fertilizers. If we use a full accounting of how much energy is used to power the engine, i.e. the input rather than the output, we will have a much higher number of calories or joules or kilowatts or horsepower or the like. In short, the 60.22 kilocalories used per hour to power the 70 watt bulb are much lower than the actual kilocalories of energy used to power the human engine.

Thermochemical energy is a term used in this very interesting website “Thermal Efficiency of a Human Being: http://mb-soft.com/public2/humaneff.html. A better term is internal energy (U), which is explained very well here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_energy. Internal energy is the sum of potential and kinetic energy and the standard measure is the joule, which is the energy needed to move one newton one meter, or pass one ampere of current through one ohm for one second, or to produce one watt for one second. Even though the joule is the SI unit (from the French Système international d'unités), it can be translated into kilocalories or kilowatt hours or horsepower or BTU’s. Here is a very nice calculator so you don’t have to do the math: http://www.convertunits.com/from/joules/to/kilocalorie. There are 4184 joules in a kilocalorie. For another look at this calculation of energy input, albeit even more torturous than mine, check out this post from the Oil Drum here: http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/4315.

The bottom line is that energy must be accounted for, and conflating energy input and output is stinky cheese. The problem arose from uncritical acceptance of a source (the FEASTA webpage) without checking the numbers. That is why I always try to lay out my methodology and sources when I make a statement based on number crunching. If you bear with me, I will go through my methodology one more time.

As I have written many times, I calculate human energy in kilocalories (or just calories or Calories in the usual manner accepted by nutritionists and most popular writers). I know how many hours I put in over a year’s time to grow food - 3000 hours - and I know that I don’t sweat and strain for 16 hours a day in the summertime when I put in my long days. I also take time for lunch and a nap most days. After surveying multiple websites where the number of calories burned during sleep generally ranges from 400-600 and depends on weight, I arrived at the reasonable assumption that the average human uses about 500 calories in 8 hours of sleep. I use a 2500 calorie a day diet, even though the standard is 2000 for women and 2500 for men, as it makes my calculations on how many people I can feed more conservative. Using this higher number also has a conservative effect when calculating calories per hour used in manual labor. Since 2500 minus 500 is 2000, I have 2000 calories to burn up in a typical day, when I work anywhere from 0 hours during 2 months of the winter to 16 hours a day during 3-4 months of summer. Apportioning 2000 calories over 16 hours is reasonable when I observe that I spend as much energy walking out to the mailbox as I do weeding carrots. I have worked a lot of jobs in my life, from archaeologist to circus ringmaster to word processor to college professor to migrant worker to punch-press operator to construction worker to farmer. I don’t sweat and strain very much and most of my coworkers didn’t either. Even working construction allows an average fit human to go out dancing at night if he/she wants to. Certainly my tiredness at the age of 61 has more to do with my age than with the “hard manual labor” I do every day. All in all, 125 calories per hour for manual human labor (it really isn’t that hard!) is reasonable. This is more than twice as much as that calculated on the FEASTA site, but well below that calculated by fitness trainers for bicycling in general (500-600 per hour).

The real benefit of my method of calculating internal energy (U) is that it is a metric that crosses all platforms. I can use it to calculate how many calories in that pound of tomatoes you bought at the farmers market versus the ones in the supermarket, I can compare horse-drawn plowing to a human with a shovel or a tiller or a tractor. I can argue for the positive feedback loop of eating part of what we grow and using those calories to grow more food as a very efficient method of growing food. Finally, I can make the claim that the human engine is more efficient than the internal combustion engine in the amount of work it gets done. Even though there are occasional flubs in general conceptions of “work” and “energy” and “efficiency,” I can actually run the numbers because my method is based on the laws of physics. Under the general rubric of “input/output analysis,” I have constructed a model of sustainable agriculture that can feed the world right now with very low fossil fuel inputs, as well as put people to work in a very efficient manner. In point of fact, input/output analysis provides a method to actually measure sustainability. I can show anyone the numbers of what I produced in the last several years at my farm and in 2010 at the food bank farm I manage. I can state with certainty that I produced 3.5 calories of food energy for every input calorie I used to grow that food in 2009 on my farm, measured in gasoline and human labor. I can state with conviction that we could get by quite nicely with only 20% of our adult population growing food for the other 80%. I know these things because I have done the work and I have the numbers. They are impressive enough. We don’t have to exaggerate the internal energy of a litre of petrol. As I said before, Rob Hopkins’ statement of “1 litre of petrol being equivalent to 35 days of hard human manual labor” is an exaggeration. Rob has the right idea but the wrong numbers.

Comment on "How Climate Change Puts Globalization in Reverse"

2011-04-13T12:11:00.000-07:00

In the Rob Hopkins interview, which is part 13 of The Nation’s video series, he makes a couple of glaring errors. These two errors are at 21:00 minutes into the video and immediately after. Here is the weblink: http://www.energybulletin.net/media/2011-04-13/how-climate-change-puts-globalization-reverse The first error is one he has made consistently in his videos over the three years that I have been viewing them. As he has done before, he states that the energy in a liter of petrol is equivalent to 35 days of hard human manual labor. This is more or less a throwaway line to make his point but he overstates the energy in a liter of petrol by almost a factor of four. This is significant if we really want to get traction with economists and engineers who actually measure this kind of thing. There is a LOT of potential energy in a liter of gasoline or petrol and we can indeed measure them and compare them to human energy by using calories or joules or BTUs or kilowatt hours or horsepower, all of which can be translated one into the other. [Caveat: By calories I mean kilocalories. It is well understood in human nutrition information that we are really talking about kilocalories and sometimes we see it written as Calories. This is just a blip in semantics.]

Unfortunately, Hopkins does not state how many hours of human labor per day, so let's plug in 8 hours. He also doesn't give an energy equivalent for human labor per hour, so I will use my own metric. I am a farmer and do hard physical labor every day, but I don't consume more than other people of my size, which is normalized at 2500 calories per day for a human male. I also don't sweat copiously all day long (it is not like playing football/soccer for 90 minutes for example) and the physical exertion has to be maintained over a long day, sometimes 16 hours in the summer. Thus it is reasonable to apportion my labor output at what it takes to get me through 16 hours. Since we use about 500 calories in an eight-hour sleep period, that leaves 2000 calories spread out over 16 hours, or 125 calories per hour. In my experience, this is a valid measurement that is robust (i.e. you can throw all kinds of bad data at it and still get valid results).

Now if we calculate Hopkins' statement with our own energy and time values we can see that he is saying a liter of petrol is equivalent to 35,000 calories (35 x 8 x 125 = 35,000). Now, checking this out on the Web, we find that a gallon of diesel does indeed have an energy value of 35,000 calories per US gallon (you may have to convert from joules or BTU's depending on the website). So, if Hopkins' meant to say that a GALLON of DIESEL has an energy value of 35 days of human labor, he would be spot on. [The corresponding value for gasoline is 31,000 calories per gallon, by the way.] However, Hopkins says that a LITER has this energy value and since there are 3.785 liters in a US gallon, he is exaggerating by a factor of 3.785 or nearly 4. Perhaps he should be saying, "A US gallon of petrol has the energy value of 35 days of human manual labor." Alternatively, he could say, "A liter of petrol has the energy value of over 9 days of human manual labor." He doesn't even need to say "hard human manual labor." Every audience gets the point about manual labor, since most people will do almost anything to get out of it.

Which brings me to my second point. A bit after his throway line about the energy value of a liter of petrol, he says that a liter can power a car for 30 miles. Since there are 3.785 liters in a gallon, this would mean that a British car gets over 113 miles per gallon. I doubt there are ANY cars in Britain with this mileage, much less on average, which is implied in his statement.

Rob Hopkins is fighting the good fight, but he needs to polish up his numbers. It really DOES matter, especially if we want to calculate our own energy consumption or compare the efficient human engine to the inefficient internal combustion engine. The comparison is stark. We don't need to engage in hyperbole.

Shifting My Paradigm

2011-04-07T09:01:00.000-07:00

Over the last couple of months I have been shifting my agricultural paradigm. I have now concluded it is unlikely farmers will ever make a fair wage. There may be confusion over what constitutes a "fair wage," but what I intend to say is that focusing on getting a fair price or a fair wage is behind the curve.

Over the past 7 years, as I spent over 3000 hours a year in food production and direct marketing, I assumed that as the cost of transportation increased the price of food at the supermarket, the organic/natural produce would settle into parity. That is, as supermarket potatoes rose in price, at some point my potatoes would be equal in price to those in the supermarket grown by industrial agriculture. However, it now seems that price rises will not just drift up. The whole system is likely to crash instead. In other words, there will be no transition to sustainable agriculture because this would mean parity for farmers' wages. I already have a system that would provide a living wage for small-scale farmers, but that is precisely the problem. In other words, giving farmers a living wage would crash the system dependent on farmers NOT getting a living wage. Sounds crazy doesn't it?

Civilization depends on slavery. You can look at past civilizations - Greek, Roman, Aztec, Sumerian and the others. They all depended on slavery for the energy to grow food. The US had slavery until 1865 and Colonel Drake had already dug the first commercial oil well in Pennsylvania in 1859. After the post-Civil War "sorting out," which included the debacles of Reconstruction and genocide on the Great Plains, the US was well-positioned to use the energy slave of petroleum to fuel civilization. The rest of the world soon followed suit and by the year 1900, civilization around the world was run on this new energy "slave."

As our energy slave of petroleum runs out, we will have to make a choice on whether to re-institute slavery or watch as civilization collapses. Actually, I doubt we would even be able to get slavery up and running in large enough numbers to do the job, even if we wanted to do so. People are just too interconnected and unmanageable in this day and age. It is likely we will just have to watch as civilization crumbles from lack of the energy slave that keeps it alive.

Back to our farmers who do not make a living wage. When Cuba had their own "special period" after the collapse of the Soviet Union and they couldn't get Soviet oil, they switched to organic/natural agriculture that was fueled by human energy. This allowed farmers to actually make a comparable living to doctors, merchants, professors, etc. for a short period. (This info is from the movie The Power of Community, 2006.) However, once Cuba got more oil flowing back into the country, along with more foreign investment and tourism, they went back to a somewhat different mixed economy, but based on their old central administration. The "special period" from 1991-1993 had few lasting effects. If you are interested in this topic, you might find this paper interesting: http://www.ecineq.org/milano/WP/ECINEQ2006-52.pdf

Now, if Cuba could actually make a transition to living wages for farmers but then went back to the old inequality as soon as they got a chance - and after only a couple of years of the change - how much more difficult would it be for us to make that change, even for just a couple of years? Since we have less centralized authority and are more estranged from our food production than Cuba, it is not likely we could make that change at all, much less make it last. Indeed, it is more likely that we will be stuck with inequality in pay for farmers right up to the moment when the US as a society implodes into a punctured balloon. This will likely leave regional economies operating somewhat coherently on a more or less tribal level. Regional fiefdoms, if you wish.

Of course, I don't know the future. However, the trend is visible. That trend is that civilization will collapse before farmers are paid a living wage. So what do you, the consumer, do? The answer is simple. You have to start growing 5% or 10% or 15% of your food now, so that you can adjust after the collapse.

How Do I Grow Food?

2011-03-31T11:19:00.000-07:00

This post is the last in my series of "Who, what, when, where, why and how." I hope you have enjoyed the progression.

In the larger view, we have to be careful how involved we become in electronic media. It may be a valid gateway to getting things done, but we need to use the tried-and-true methods of human instruction on a face-to-face level. These methods are usually some form of walking and talking, as well as talking and doing. This means the standard lecture series where you have someone in front of a class explaining things to a group of interested people. Even better is to take a page from Socrates, who walked and talked with his students in the agora (the Greek public square and market) and could integrate necessary questions of how to live right there in the context of making a living in the marketplace. This is the necessary intersection of ideas and actions. Going to a class is still a valid way to get instruction, but you really do have to have a human up there in front, not just a screen.

Even better is to learn by doing. It is quite possible and even highly desirable to get instruction while engaged in handwork. This can mean, for instance, learning about archaeology by working in the field. Another viable method for our context of feeding ourselves is to go out to work on a farm or market garden. If you are in Whatcom County, Washington, you can come out to my farm and learn about food production while you work. Currently, we are in the midst of planting, but there are things to do in other seasons. For those of you reading this blog in other parts of the country, you could certainly call around to other farmers close to you and go out to help them. This will allow you to learn production techniques on the ground and at to your own pace. I highly recommend this option. Book learning, electronic media, and just experimenting on your own are all valuable, but you start ahead of the game by helping out a farmer who is already doing the hard work on the ground. This is part of what is known as "doing the real work." Not only are you doing physical work, but you are also re-orienting your spirit.

So . . . a relatively inexpensive mode of instruction where you learn by putting in your energy. This is similar to what farming really is. You put in your energy ahead of time, rather than just going out and harvesting whatever is available. In a world where what is available is going downhill in both quantity and quality, putting in your energy before harvest makes good sense.

Ultimate Efficiency

2011-03-27T09:06:00.000-07:00

Partly because of my training in biological anthropology, partly because of my years as a migrant worker, and partly because of my model of low-input agriculture, I am quite convinced of the efficiency of the human engine.

Many years ago, my girlfriend and I set out from Tungsten Mine in the Pasayten Wilderness in Washington state, walking to the trailhead at Irongate Camp. Just after us a party of horse packers left the old abandoned mine to go the same distance. We arrived at the trailhead well before the other party. This was a distance of 18 miles and we had already done the 3 miles down from Cathedral Pass in the morning before we set out from the mine, so our total was 21 miles for the day and we carried all our gear. The horse packers may have done a little sightseeing and the horses probably got a little time for grazing, but it was quite easy for us to cover the same distance as the horses while carrying full packs. Our input was 4500 calories or less. Each horse's input was 12,000 - 15,000 calories, depending on their load, plus there were riders using up around 1500 extra calories per person. Clearly, us humans could do the work of carrying gear and covering the distance required at a much lower energy input than the horses.

The human engine is very efficient. As you step out, neurons fire and muscles contract. Then the pendulum action of your step moves the mass of your body forward. As you step down again the muscles contract again, but also using some of the energy stored by the pendulum action. As you continue in motion, alternating right and left legs, you use the kinetic energy in a rhythmic motion that moves you forward in a very efficient manner. The pendulum is the key to the efficiency of bipedal motion. Efficient quadrupeds, like wolves, can travel greater distances in a day's time - up to a 100 miles per day in winter - but they need high energy foods, like moose meat, to do so. Horses are pikers compared to wolves and humans.

The human hand is a very efficient tool, especially with the opposable thumb. Because of the length of our thumb and its position on the hand, we can do all kinds of things our nearest relatives, the chimpanzees and bonobos cannot. With our grotesquely-enlarged brain we can invent all kinds of tools to help us manage our daily lives, but the arrangement of our digits means we start out with 10 tools at our disposal - 5 on each hand.

Let me provide an example of how efficient the human engine really is. As many of you know, I farm using tillers and human labor, because the quantities of gasoline and diesel needed for tractor agriculture makes it unsustainable. In other words, my inputs from human labor and the 15-20 gallons of gas I use in my tillers per year to grow food on 1.5-2.0 acres is much lower than my outputs in food calories. As a general rule, if you are riding on it while you are working, it is unsustainable because the fossil fuel calorie inputs will exceed the food calorie outputs.

Three days ago, I tilled up about 15,000 square feet, or a little over a third of an acre, in 3 hours. I used a gallon of gas, which has a thermodynamic value of 31,000 calories per gallon. My human calorie value was 375 calories guiding the self-propelled tiller as my overall work is calculated at 125 calories per hour. Total inputs for 15,000 square feet were 31,375 calories or 2.09 calories per square foot. Rounding to 2 calories per square foot for convenience, the question is: "How much soil could I till up in one hour with a shovel, hoe and/or cultivator at 2 calories per square foot?" Since I work at a rate of 125 calories per hour all day long and I am not even breathing hard and barely sweating, I calculate I should be able to dig up 62.5 square feet of garden and rake it to the same consistency of a first pass with a tiller in one hour. It should be noted that this is not sod, but half bare ground that wasn’t covered over the winter and half with a cover crop on it. The cover crops were favas and wheat, which provided a range of tilling difficulty.

62.5 square feet of ground is less than an 8 x 8 foot square, so the question is, “Can I dig up an 8 foot square in an hour?” That's easy! Of course I can! Two days ago I and one other person dug up the soil in two hoop houses in less than an hour. Each hoop house was 30 x 10 feet, so the total area came to 600 square feet. One of us used a hoe and the other a bent-tine cultivator, what I call a potato fork. The ground in the hoop houses had been planted with a vetch/rye cover crop last fall and we had whacked it down to ground level a week before to make it easier to dig. Some rye had grown up again, but it wasn't jungley at all. The digging was fairly straightforward - just whack at it and turn it over. A shovel would have taken longer, but using the right tools, the calorie load for two people for one hour - 250 calories - and a conservative estimate of one hour for 600 square feet, the input calculation comes out to .42 calories per square foot to work up ground with a mowed cover crop on it. We should add in a little time to mow the crop down with a scythe or for chopping the cover crop in (the reason some people use oats, by the way, as it chops in easily), so rounding up to 1/2 calorie per square foot using hand tools seems reasonable.

So . . . 2 calories per square foot using a self-propelled walk-behind tiller and a human to guide it versus 1/2 calorie per square foot using human labor and hand tools. Quite a difference in the overall picture isn't it? The human with a shovel or hoe is 4 times as efficient as a tiller and probably many times more efficient than a tractor. [I will have to get some data on tractor fuel use for a more rigorous comparison.] In the future, as we run out of fossil fuels and are gasping for breath in a carbon-laden atmosphere, we will still be able to till up ground, prepare seed beds, plant, weed and harvest using the most efficient engine on the planet - the human organism. Right now, we could put the unemployed to work digging up land and growing food by hand to feed the starving masses, but we would have to have a massive redistribution of wealth to pay their wages. Even though it makes sense and is doable right now, it is unlikely because of the inequities built into our modern life. In the future, after the American empire has collapsed, maybe we can get it done. The model is right in front of you. You just have to pay a fair wage to people to do the work.

Why Should I Grow Food?

2011-03-17T14:56:00.000-07:00

This is the fifth in a series of "Who, what, when, where, why and how." As for the lead question, notice how I didn't ask, "Why Should I Become a Farmer?" That's because the real key to solving our food crisis is many people growing food on small plots. In other words, "Many hands make light work." Focusing on mainstream views of what farmers do, what agriculture is, and how you can compete will suck you into the mainstream growth business model, and that is quite the opposite of what we need now. Modern industrial agriculture has failed and postmodern sustainable farming/gardening is working, right now, as we speak.

From a hunter/gatherer perspective, the ideal is to just harvest what is already there. However, there are too many of us on the planet so we have to grow food. In order to grow food, we have to prepare the ground, control the water and weeds and put our labor into production. Modern farmers also have extra responsibilities. If they are doing direct-marketing, they have to spend a significant amount of time and money doing farmers markets, delivering their product and developing more markets. If the farmer is selling commodities instead of selling right to the customer, they have to take what the market gives them. Direct-marketing allows you to become a price-maker, but the downside is the time and money spent on marketing and selling. Commodity, or indirect, marketing means you have to be a price-taker. Either way, you are at a distinct disadvantage, given the way markets are controlled by corporations who are not only driving UP the cost of farm inputs, but driving DOWN the price of farm outputs. The farmer is caught in between.

The easy way to get around this dilemma is to grow your own food and then see if you have extra. In other words, change the focus from growing for market to growing for yourself. If you have extra production, you can then shop it around to your neighbors or at the nearest farmers markets. This is one of the reasons I have been involved in starting three farmers markets here in NW Washington in the last five years. In the modern business model, the farmer has to assess the market and then grow what he/she can sell. In the postmodern business model, the farmer will be able to sell all he/she can grow. The dynamic of being able to sell all you can grow might be upon us as early as this summer, if I read the problems coming out of the Middle East and North Africa correctly. It won't hurt to be ready AND growing your own food has immediate benefits.

I am giving a presentation to beginning gardeners at the end of this month and I am going to start out with the following question, "Why grow a garden?" The short answers for this presentation are:
1) It is pleasant - many people find it relaxing and fun to grow their own food.
2) It is economical - you can grow quite a bit of food in a small space and this helps your food bill.
3) It is nutritious - food from your garden hasn't been sitting in a store for several days, losing nutrients.
Some people may not realize it, but the subjective sense you get of well-being when you have your hands in the soil is a primary (and primeval!) driver for gardening. It really is a simple endeavor and even the rhythm you get into when you are weeding has beneficial effects - lower blood pressure, beneficial exercise, etc. When you add in the economic and nutritional effects, it really becomes a no-brainer. If you have the time, you should garden.

There is another aspect to gardening that is underappreciated. When you are using your own labor to grow something that you eat, you are actually leveraging your energy. The calories you use in weeding carrots can come from the carrots you are eating, or the raspberries you had for breakfast, or the wheat you grew that was in your toast that morning, etc. This is significant. For example, I grow about 55% of the food Toni and I eat. I found this out by keeping store receipts for several months, inputting the data and then trimming it in a statistics program to get rid of outliers, and then doing an average. The average was right around $275 a month, or $3300 per year. I arbitrarily assigned the value of what I provide for the house at $4000, so this works out to 55%. You might note that this includes wine, beer, ice cream, chocolate, and other simple luxuries, so if we had to we could lower our food costs quite a bit. Also, our food costs are about 16% of our combined income, well within the ballpark range for our "progressive" social status and above the overall US average of 13% for 2010 (US Dept. of Labor statistics).

But I digress - back to leveraging. If I spent $4,000 a year on food, or 8-9% of our combined income, that would be a significant cost. BUT I am not spending $4,000 on food because my production costs are only about 10% of the value of the food I grow, so I save $3600 right there. That is a leveraging factor of 1:10. Also, the calorie aspect is significant in leveraging, as I mentioned above. In 2009, the dollar value of food for the house was about 12% of what I produced and the calorie value was about 464,000 calories. To produce those calories for the house required 12% of my energy calories in production, which were 3000 hours for the year at 125 calories per hour, or 45,000 calories to produce 464,000 calories. This is a leverage ratio of over 1:10. [Sidebar: I have written at length on how I calculate this 125 calories per hour, so I won't go into it again. Suffice it to say that I start with 2500 calories per day, subtract 500 for 8 hours sleep and then divide the remaining 2000 by 16 hours for 125 calories per hour all day long.] So, using two methods of calculation - dollar value and energy value - I can leverage my time and energy at a ratio of 1:10 by growing my own food.

My final point about the value of growing your own food involves risk analysis. There are four levels of risk analysis in thinking about food safety and they are based on how close you are to the source of your food.
Level 1 - the highest level - You grow your own food. Here you control almost everything because you make the decisions. You may get some pesticide drift from your neighbor's rose bushes, for example, which you cannot control, but for all practical purposes, you know what goes into your food and how clean it is.
Level 2 - You buy food from someone you trust. You get your food from a second party and you know how he/she grows their food. You have taken a farm tour, for instance, and you have a high degree of confidence in the methods used to grow your food.
Level 3 - You buy food from a third party that has some form of certification that you find significant. This could be organic certification or the normal state health rules that all supermarkets have to abide by. They really are all the same because what you are doing is trusting the 3rd-party certifier. Many people don't quite get that organic certification is just a paper trail marketing device and hardly any different from what supermarkets are already doing. This is a logic error, of conflating safety and marketing, testing and paper trails.
Level 4 - Don't worry about it and just eat what you can get. This is the lowest level of risk analysis.
If you think of food safety in terms of lowering your risk, obviously you gain by growing your own food.

The bottom line in this blog post is that you gain significantly by growing your own food. As I said in regards to my upcoming presentation for beginning gardeners, it is pleasant, economical and nutritious. Once you are growing your own food, it is but a simple step to grow a little more.

When Will I Need to Grow My Own Food?

2011-03-16T09:05:00.000-07:00

This is the fourth in a series of "Who, what, when, where, why and how." The quick answer to when we need to worry about our food was yesterday. Thus, if we are trying to catch up to food supply concerns we should have developed forty years ago, we might want to consider a quantum leap forward to get ahead of the curve. In other words, instead of trying to educate the public, trying to secure a clean food supply by consumer pressure, or setting up buying clubs and co-ops, we might want to consider going right to the source. This is the soil itself. A line from an old Grateful Dead song, "Mountains of the Moon" (Aoxomoxoa, 1969) is relevant here, "The earth will see you all through this time."

I started questioning my eating habits and the food supply in general over forty years ago in 1970. At the time, I was running a head shop and selling underground newspapers. I was also leafletting and selling books and buttons for the first Earth Day. I had been involved in the antiwar movement for two years, since I got out of high school, and I clearly understood the ramifications of Kent State. In May, 1970, it became obvious Nixon and his thugs were more than willing to kill anyone who opposed them rather than bow to pressure to end the War in Vietnam. Even white suburban college kids were not immune. During that summer of 1970, it became obvious that going to a demonstration or working on alternatives to the mainstream death culture didn't go far enough. Marching against the war and then retiring to a McDonald's for some fries and a coke afterwards seemed foolish and hypocritical. Articles in the underground newspapers I was reading weekly gave me new information about the link between the power structure of empire and the food system. It was all part of the same sickness. So I decided to make a change.

I saw a nutritionist and she gave me the usual mainstream view that I needed a gram of protein for each kilogram of body weight per day. That meant I needed 72 grams per day. I started doing some research and found varying interpretations of what I actually needed in terms of protein. One research article even suggested us Americans consume too much protein. This was something I could see all around me. At the time, it was common to have meat three times a day, much more frequently than the rest of the world. I decided not to worry about protein. I still ate some milk products, so I was probably getting enough protein. The real key, however, was when I started eating whole grains. This was made easier by a group of people who had started People's Pantry in Minneapolis (where I was living). These folks bought grains and dried fruits and nuts and beans in bulk and sold them by the pound at a slight markup (10% I believe). You just went there with your pennies and nickels and some paper bags and got brown rice for 12 cents a pound. Other items were just as cheap. This was NOT some organized effort. It was just a few "dirty hippies" doing the right thing.

At this time I also joined the Eco-op, which focused on organic produce. This was a basic buying club that required coordination and some capital but relied on volunteer labor for distribution. I was happy to help sort out the orders each week and we got an awful lot of good food that way. Later on, in 1971, my roommate and I (and lots of other people!) worked on setting up the first food co-op in Minneapolis, North Country Co-op. This integrated the cost plus 10% bulk food concept into a storefront. The co-op also served as a gateway for folks to learn how to eat properly, as well as a gathering place for integrating the separate strains of the Movement (yes, I do mean the Movement - even though Steve Martin did a very funny skit about it on SNL some years later). As one of my friends said at the time, "See that guy over there digging rice out of the bin? If it wasn't for the co-op, he'd probably be dead of an overdose by now."

Over the years, being a vegetarian and eating whole foods became integral to my health and well-being. It kept me sane and increased my awareness of how the political becomes the personal becomes the professional. I moved to the country in 1971 and went on the road in 1973, eventually becoming a migrant worker. I dropped vegetarianism in 1981 after 11 years because I was tired of turning down free meals and it didn't seem so bad to have the occasional meat dish. However, thirty years later, I still eat little meat. It is mostly for flavoring. The real gain is the intersection of the soil and what I put into my mouth. This started with becoming a vegetarian in 1970. Even though I grew up on a farm, I didn't really put things together until 1970. Cataclysmic changes, oppression and recession, expansion on the road and contraction in the time of Reagan - all had their part to play.

So what's the point? One of the criticisms of the food co-ops from the early 1970's was that we were working backwards. Instead of starting with retail, then a warehouse, then co-op farms, then a trucking collective, we should have started with farmers, like the Finnish co-ops from the 1930's used as a model at the time. This was a valid criticism, even though us "dirty hippies" didn't have much to work with and had to start wherever we could. Stuck in the city with pennies and nickels in our pockets from selling underground newspapers or candles and beads on the street, we could fit in the interstices of the mainstream culture. The counterculture had creativity and human capital, but little money capital. The best way to do it was the way we did it. However, we cannot forget the lessons of the past.

Now we have some capital and some land. We have the ability to organize and utilize vacant lots and backyards of our neighbors (our neighbors don't hate us anymore, for one thing). We can do things from the ground up. As we grow food, we are creating new wealth and new capital. The primary economy is where capital is created. [Sidebar: The secondary economy is trading goods and services for money. Zero sum economics is a valid concept in the secondary economy, as well as in the tertiary economy - using money to make money.] Farming/gardening creates food from the soil. The other ways to create capital, like logging and mining and oil drilling, are not sustainable and are running out. Growing food can be sustainable, although mainstream industrial agriculture certainly isn't.

Since we are in a worldwide downturn that will probably continue to descend into global recession and then global depression, it is our responsibility to come up with solutions. One thing we can do is make the quantum leap forward. We don't have to relearn the lessons of the last forty years. We can go right to the soil. The time to worry about your food was yesterday. The time to grow your own food is now.

Who Will Grow My Food?

2011-03-12T09:52:00.001-08:00

This is the third in a series. The first two were, "What Will I Eat?" and "Where Will I Get My Food." For this installment, the obvious answer is, "I will grow my own food." However, that is not too helpful for those of you in condos, city apartments, who are shut-ins, or even in a fortunate situation where you have more cash than time.

In point of fact, the dividing line between growing your own food and paying someone else to do it for you is your time. If you have time, you can grow food and thus turn your labor into food capital. You don't have to be a Marxist to understand surplus value, which is simply adding value to the products owned by someone else by putting your time in, for which you are paid less than the value you added. Nor do you have to be an economist, nor a Marxist, nor a Marxist economist to understand creating new wealth - or new capital - from the soil. Simply put, you can take your labor, add some soil and seeds and water, and grow something you can eat or trade or sell. [Sidebar: This is probably a better explanation of how farming started in the first place 10,000 years ago than complex theories of overpopulation, abundance of water, etc. - all part of the anthropological view over the last 100 years.]

If you don't have time, but you have cash, you can pay a farmer (or even your neighbor) to grow your food. Notice that this idea is entirely outside the modern business model of someone farming as a business, someone else processing food as a business, someone else transporting the food to a market, and someone else selling the food to you. It is simple and direct and cheaper.

As I have asserted many times in public over the last several years, a good target for feeding ourselves in the post-peak oil future is for 20% of the adult population working as full-time farmers. At present, 1-2% of the US population are farmers and most of these are only part-time. Obviously, whether or not you buy into my rather conservative estimate of 20% full-time farmers, we will need a massive infusion of people growing food. How is this going to happen? Well, it certainly won't happen if we continue expecting farmers to work at less than minimum wage! So . . . it would be to your advantage, if you have more cash than time, to pay someone to grow food for you that has more time than cash. Simple, direct and cheaper than buying from a supermarket. Once again, this does not require buying into the modern business model, nor does it require re-forming modern society and the oil economy. It works because someone takes individual action.

If you are a shut-in or disabled, the cash/time equation is not applicable. However, here is where basic human charity comes to the fore. Those of you who have disposable income should be tithing at least 10% for those unfortunates around you. Also note that tithing does not require a complicated system that gives you a tax break (hah!) for participating in a quasi-philanthropic system that has an incredible amount of overhead so that only a small percentage of gifts actually go towards helping people. You can help those around you in a direct manner. Expecting low-income farmers to take care of it while those of you with disposable income shirk your responsibilities is certainly not fair and assuredly won't work. Yes, let me say it again. If you have a good job and disposable income, you have a responsibility to take care of those around you who are not as fortunate. Forget this nonsense about "I've earned it by my hard work." I have seen and heard a lot of this over the last 60 years and I have yet to find someone who has a comfortable life who did not get some advantage from their society that was withheld from others. So just accept that you got lucky and do the right thing. Tithing is easy.

For those of you who do not own land, there is an awful lot of it available in vacant lots, rooftop gardening possibilities, container gardening, community gardens, adding a greenhouse/solarium to your house, buying shares in a farmer's enterprise, etc. Some of these alternatives require some cash, but a lot of them can be had for just labor. I work with community gardens and a food bank farm and we always give people food when they come out to do volunteer work. There are plenty of opportunities out there, especially in metro areas. You just have to get off the couch or out from behind your computer screen and do the searching.

To recap, first make a decision about time versus money. If you have plenty of time, you have time to research the possibilities. You also have time to help someone else who already has a functioning garden or farm. If you have plenty of money and not much time, there are a lot of farmers and gardeners and gardener wannabees who could use a little capital to get going.

Comment on Amanda Little's Article "Making Every Calorie Count"

2011-03-09T12:26:00.000-08:00

The following is an email I just sent to Amanda Little, who had a very good article in the New York Times today, March 9, 2011. It's about time that someone else got on board with a metric that crosses all platforms. I have been quite disappointed over the years at the lack of comprehension and intellectual dishonesty of mainstream economists, who should be doing the heavy lifting on this subject. They leave it up to a farmer to do the grunt work - as usual! At least we now have a journalist who gets it. Here is a link to the article if you want to read it: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/09/opinion/09Little.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha212

Amanda - I read your article in today's New York Times (March 9, 2011) with some pleasure. It's about time this idea gets a wider audience! I have been flogging this very idea for several years now and I am writing to give you the nuts and bolts so you can take it to the next level.

I am a sustainable farmer up here in the farthest northwest corner of the continental United States. I have been working on what I call thedual-track sustainable model for the last six years. Several years ago I developed input/output analysis to measure how sustainable I really am. If you want to do science and you want to convince people, you have be able to quantify sustainability and you need a metric that crosses all platforms. The calorie is ideal because we can compare energy in gas, diesel, human labor, even horse labor inputs versus the output in food produced. [Sidebar: We really mean kilocalorie or Calorie when we say "calorie" but everyone gets this by now.] The calorie is something we all know about and is easily convertible from joules, kilowatts, horsepower, or BTUs. As you say in your article, we are used to seeing it on food anyway. Nerdboy questions about the small difference in relative heat needed to raise a kilo of water 1 degree centigrade from 15 degrees to 16 degrees versus 16 degrees to 17 degrees are easily swept away in the rounding factor when doing conversions. More difficult are questions about kilowatts vs. kilowatt hours, but this is not really a problem either, since we are talking about absolute amounts of thermodynamic energy and it makes little difference whether my gas use is done in an hour or two hours when I am tilling a field. The variance is just my time, which I account for separately.

Currently I use human labor and a small amount of gasoline in my tillers to produce quite a bit of food on small acreage (1-2 acres). I have tested my model for several years and I also corroborated it on the food bank farm I manage in Lynden, Washington last year. Here is an article on the food bank farm, community gardens and our new farmers market: http://www.bellinghamherald.com/2011/03/07/1896937/lynden-blooming-with-community.html (By the way, this is the third farmers market I have helped start since 2006 - another key to sustainability.)

Here is how it works. I keep track of all the gas used for my tillers (I don't have a tractor as tractors are unsustainable.) Each gallon of gas is equivalent to 31,000 calories (checkable on the web). By the way, each gallon of diesel is equivalent to 35,000 calories. I calculate my labor at 125 calories per hour. This is a compromise figure based on a 2500 calorie a day diet. Even though men need 2500 to thrive (not just survive) and women need 2000 on average, I default to 2500 to be conservative in my calculations. Since a human expends about 500 calories in an 8-hour sleep period, that leaves 16 hours per day of activity. Now as you well know, most people don't grunt and strain and spend a lot of calories on their work in bursts of speed and then engage in down times of exhaustion. Most people, including farmers, are busy doing things all day long at their workplace. This leaves them with energy to do things after work, whether it is just cooking supper and watching TV until bedtime or going out dancing or visiting or what have you. People also spend as much energy on their days off as they do during their workweek. All in all, dividing the 2000 calories left over after subtracting 500 from 2500 and apportioning it over the 16 hours of activity makes good sense. This means that we can average our labor use in farming at 125 calories per hour (2000 / 16 = 125).

Now we can compute our inputs. In 2010, I put in 2000 hours on my farm for a total of 250,000 calories (this does not include 1000 hours on the food bank farm and other community-oriented activities). I used 17.25 gallons of gas for growing food, which calculates to 534,750 calories. There were no other inputs. My input total for 2010 was thus 784,750 calories. With this quantity of gasoline and human energy Iproduced 1,705,537 calories on 1.12 acres. This is a positive ratio of 2.17. In other words, I produced 2.17 calories of food for every calorie of energy I used to grow that food in 2010. If you accept the metric that industrial agriculture uses 10 calories of fossil fuel to produce 1 calorie of food (a negative ratio since more energy goes into production than is actually produced), this means I am over20 times more efficient than industrial agriculture. Obviously, this type of small-scale agriculture is truly sustainable.

In 2009, my best year for production, I used 1,064,750 calories to produce 3,789,138 calories of food. The inputs came from 22.25 gallons of gasoline and 3000 hours of labor. The ratio of 2009 was thus 3.56 calories of food for every calorie of energy I used to grow that food. This was over 35 times more efficient than industrial agriculture. The difference between 2009 and 2010 was the crappy weather, something we need to take into account and prepare for, by the way.

As for measuring outputs, this requires rigorous weighing and measuring of yields. This is not difficult - you just have to do it with every pound of potatoes, green beans, kale, etc. To calculate calories per pound (or pints in the case of raspberries and cherry tomatoes) I use http://caloriecount.about.com/. Using the same source for all your food calorie values is important and this site is the best one I have found. If you want to check it, you don't have to sign in - just type in a food in the search box on the first webpage. You will get a plethora of choices and I usually go to the whole food selection. The amounts used vary, so you will have to convert from grams to pounds. Just remember there are 454 grams in a pound. After all this calculation, I can total up my calories produced based on yield and the calories per pound. This also gives me surprising results, such as an average calorie per pound for diversified small-scale agriculture, with over 80 varieties of produce, grain and dry beans, of 230-242 calories per pound. These kinds of metrics also allow you to calculate a calorie-based price for your produce, which I have done. For example, if you paid a small-scale sustainable farmer only 1 cent per calorie and he/she produced 15,000 pounds of food at 230 calories per pound, the farmer would make $34,500 for his/her work. This would be a living wage for most farmers, given the capital costs of production at around $3-4,000 for this amount of food. There are plenty of ways to go with this kind of calculation and using the calorie method. You can even incorporate horse labor at 12,000 calories a day needed to maintain a draft horse and 15,000 calories a day if you are working the horse hard.

One last calculation: If we accept that most food in the US travels 1500 miles from farm to table on a semi that gets 5 miles per gallon of diesel fuel, we can compare the calorie load - just for transport - to buying direct from a farmer at a farmers market. We can also put a cork in the intellectually dishonest economists who say transport on a large truck from California is more energy efficient than buying at a local farmers market. So . . . if you have 40,000 pounds on your semi that travels 1500 miles and uses 300 gallons of diesel at 35,000 calories per gallon, your carbon load is 263 calories per pound. If you overload the truck and put 50,000 pounds on it, the calorie load is 210. This compares unfavorably with me going to my closest farmers markets in Ferndale (6 miles roundtrip) or Bellingham (25 miles roundtrip). My little truck carries 500 pounds of produce (at least!) and gets 18 miles to the gallon. At 31,000 calories per gallon of gasoline, my calorie load to the Ferndale Farmers Market is 21 calories per pound and to the Bellingham Farmers Market it is 86 calories per pound. So . . . 210-263 transport calories per pound for food at your local supermarket vs. 21-86 transport calories per pound at a local farmers market. Quite a difference and it is important to note that the closer the farmers market, the more energy efficient the produce is. If the farmer is using truly sustainable methods (i.e. no tractor and lots of hand labor) in production, the difference in energy footprint is staggering.

When we calculate calories per pound for local vs. long-haul transport, we can also see where the cutoff point is where selling to a far-off farmers market becomes as energy intensive as long-haul transport on overloaded semi-trailers. For instance, there is a local organic farm here in Whatcom County that sells most of their produce to metro farmers markets in Seattle. Their truck gets 15 miles to the gallon of gasoline and carries 3,000 pounds of food. Their roundtrip distance is 300 miles to the markets and back, so 20 gallons of gasoline are used. If we use calorie calculation, we can see that this farm has a calorie load of 207 transport calories per pound. In other words, if you are selling to a farmers market 150 miles away, the energy footprint of your food is the same as the national average of food hauled 1500 miles on a semi. There will certainly be differences in the energy used to produce the food, which may offset the transport calorie load, but this would depend on how much fuel you use for tractors. Without hard data on fuel use from farms using tractors, I cannot make that calculation, but I suspect that even organic farms using tractors have high enough fuel usage that they are not sustainable. In other words, they are still benefiting from cheap oil, just like industrial agriculture.

I hope this has not been too dense for you, but I have been doing this for several years now, as well as blogging on my results, and I feel everyone has a responsibility to get up to speed on matter such as these, so I don't talk down to my audience. If you wish to contact me for further info, feel free. You can also read my blogs on Local Harvest at http://www.localharvest.org/blog/15945/ or on Blogspot at http://fullattention.blogspot.com/. Keep up the good work and all the best to you.

Fertilizer Question

2011-03-08T12:06:00.000-08:00

Recently, I received a question about using soymeal in my fertilizer mix. As I mentioned, there are pluses and minuses. Since 95% of soybeans grown in this country are GMO's, it is likely any soymeal you buy for your nitrogen source will be GMO soymeal. That's the minus. The plus is that there is likely to be less pesticide residue in feedgrade soymeal than in cottonseed meal, which is not even listed as feed for animals and so has fewer restrictions on pesticide use. If you still don't like the idea of using soymeal, here is your basic alternative - grow your own nitrogen.

The average soybean yield in the US is 50 bushels per acre and a bushel of soybeans weighs 60 pounds. This calculates to 3,000 pounds per acre. Since soymeal is generally 7% nitrogen, each acre of soybeans grown yields approximately 210 pounds of nitrogen per acre. This is enough for two years worth of corn, which needs around 100 pounds of nitrogen per acre - and even more for other, less demanding crops. By the way, 100 pounds per acre for corn is a compromise figure, as corn silage needs about 150 pounds of nitrogen per acre BUT you are not returning the stalks to the soil - unlike sweet corn or ear corn. On the other hand, some extension services say you need 1.5 pounds of nitrogen for each bushel of corn produced. For 200 bushels per acre (a maximum number and not likely for small-scale production) you would need 300 pounds per acre. However, the extension services are in thrall to the chemical companies so we should be wary of anything they recommend. We also know there is WAY too much fertilizer put on industrial ag fields and it flows down into the ocean, resulting in algae blooms the size of Delaware in the Gulf of Mexico, for instance. There is also nitrogen available in the soil. Even though 98% is in the organic form (and unavailable), the 2% that is available is still considerable. About 50 pounds available nitrogen per acre is not unreasonable. [By the way, I just used "organic" in the organic chemistry usage. I assume you can keep the two uses of "organic" straight.] All in all, shooting for 100 pounds of nitrogen added to your soil each year is a good compromise to both ensure soil fertility and do so in a non-wasteful manner (i.e. growing biomass is much preferable to pouring on chemicals or seed meal).

So, you can indeed grow your own nitrogen and then you won't have to worry about pesticides and GMO's from your supplier who may be halfway across the country or the world. The next trick is to make it part of your rotation. My rotation is a six-year rotation:
1) grain - barley, wheat, rye, spelt, triticale
2) soybeans or favas
3) root - potatoes, onions, carrots, beets, etc.
4) fruit - corn, tomatoes, squash, etc.
5) pea - peas, beans, soybeans, favas

6) leaf - salad mix, cabbage, greens, etc.

Notice that in my rotation, there is one year for growing a legume and then two years for other crops. I don't put any fertilizer on my legume crops during that rotation and I depend on residual levels of phosphorus, potassium, sulfur, calcium, trace minerals, etc. to carryover. This fits in well with my overall scheme and gives me good yields. There are other advantages to this system, too. For example, growing grain conditions the soil. I can even grow a winter cover crop where I just had legumes, too, as this helps to "capture" the nitrogen produced during the legume crop (rather than being chewed up by microbes and contributing to methane in the atmosphere). I then go back to my rotation in the spring.

The upshot here is that you can grow your own nitrogen and this is one of my ongoing experiments. So far it works great.

Where Will I Get My Food?

2011-03-06T14:16:00.000-08:00

This is the second part of a series. The first part was "What Will I Eat?" and focused on food available locally and in-season, even at the end of winter. The idea is there are plentiful resources right in front of you that you may not have considered. Now I would like to focus on where you (and I) will get our food once normal supply infrastructure has broken down.

Let's ask a simple question, "Where will I get my food?" The simple answer is usually something along the lines of, "I will go to the grocery store and buy food with money." This is what we are used to and most people don't even think about what might happen once war hits close to home, or we have to deal with famine or pestilence. Nevertheless, it is wise to deconstruct the usual answer. There are four parts to this answer: 1) go to the 2) store and 3) buy food with 4) money. All four components assume a functioning infrastructure - something that might not exist in the future.

1) Normally we go somewhere to get our food. We get in our cars or ride a bus or use our bicycle or sometimes even walk. For most people in the US, the mode of transportation is the automobile. Very few of us do our shopping via public transport or bicycling or walking. This is a problem as gas prices increase, and we will either have to reduce our automobile trips or make accommodations such as carpooling and loop transport. It is unlikely mass transit will be able to take up the slack in the US, simply because of the incompetence of government and the sheer scale of getting buses or trams to every nook and cranny of where we live. In short, there is no good substitute for getting in our cars and going to a store to buy food.

What we will have to do is either get our food within walking or cycling distance. For most fit people, a travel distance of 25 miles one way by bicycle (50 roundtrip) is about the limit for buying food. This makes the concept of local more restrictive than previously thought. In essence, local would be 25 miles from your home, rather than 100 miles or within the county or within the state borders.

2) Most people buy their food from a store that is specifically designated for this purpose. Whether it is a convenience store, a mom-and-pop, a co-op, or a supermarket, the store has overhead, a payroll to meet, and a need for profit for the owners. If the store cannot turn a profit, it is unlikely the store will stay open. This bodes ill for stores in a time of uncertain oil supplies and higher prices at the gas pump. When people have to make house payments and get to work in their cars, they will try to skimp wherever they can and food is one of the first places people try to cut costs. This translates into greater pressure on a store's bottom line from the customer. Add this pressure to the greater costs associated with a rise in oil prices that percolates through the whole supply/distribution chain and stores will have a tighter profit margin. The inefficient stores will go out of business, leaving fewer places to buy food.

Unlike a grocery store, the farmer is well used to operating at below minimum wage levels and often at a loss. In the future, buying direct from a farmer is likely to remain a viable alternative for just this reason.

3) Nowadays, most people buy their food. Although there are a few people who garden, less than 1% of the US population grows food as a business. This will be a problem when higher gas prices start interrupting supply/distribution chains. People may then be unable to buy food. It will likely be sporadic at first, like the gas stations sporadically out of gas during the fuel crisis of the early 1970's. However, a little bit of supply disruption goes a long way and people are likely to panic and hoard food when they can get it. This will exacerbate the problem, as it did in the 1970's.

The obvious solution here is to grow your own food and store staples in your own storage facilities. You can also contract with your neighbors to grow certain items and trade with each other. You can even contract directly with a farmer and pay him/her ahead of time to provide food for you.

4) Right now, people buy their food with money, but this may have to change. Unemployment is still high in this country and there are a lot of people who could be working growing food for each other. The reasons this is not being done are several: high-priced land, land locked up by selfish or deluded bureaucracies (like vacant lots), corporations and even so-called "sustainable" business organizations protecting their niches, laziness, and just plain-old inertia. People don't question the system they grew up in, even when it becomes clear the system itself is killing them. Thus they continue to focus on getting money somehow and then exchanging that money for something to eat.

The solution here is to exchange labor directly for food. This can be very simple, but it requires a commitment to work. If you want to learn how to farm or even how to garden, there are plenty of people who can show you the way. However, you have to be on-time and reliable, which is hard for most people to do. Another solution is barter or alternative currencies. These solutions are part of an overall change in business that will become increasingly necessary, but many people are reluctant to jump on a new bandwagon. Simply working for food is readily available to anyone.

The bottom line in this post is that we can take our usual response to a question and break it down into its component parts. This makes it easier to formulate solutions to our basic question as we reassemble the component parts along with their simple solutions.

What Will I Eat?

2011-03-02T13:45:00.000-08:00

As I write this, crude oil is up over $117 a barrel and the stock market is reeling. Gas pump prices are approaching $4.00 a gallon and people are clearly worried. Although the Libyan crisis is driving the short-term price swings, there is a fundamental problem in world markets, unnoticed by most media. This problem is the coming downturn in the supply of cereal grains.

Flooding in Australia, drought in China, drought last year in Russia, reneging on export contracts by Russia and India, political pressure to reduce exports in Argentina, diversion of corn to ethanol in the US, poor harvests elsewhere in the world and the overall lack of sufficient grain reserves, all contribute to a vexing scenario. Sometime this summer, it is likely we will be seeing some gaps in supermarket shelves right here in the US. Although there will still be food, it will become more and more expensive, so people will have to actually think about eating local. Up to now, eating local has been more about "cachet" than an urgent driver in householder economics. That is likely to change dramatically, as rising transportation costs drive up the price of food in the supermarket. Here is a sample of what the informed consumer can eat locally, right here in NW Washington state and right now at the end of winter - typically the time of fewer sources of fresh local food.

Let's take a tour of our house and I will list the choices I have to eat today, sorted by the major food groups of fruit, vegetables, grain & beans, and animal products. Unless noted otherwise, these were all grown and processed by either Toni or I.

Fruit:
1) Apples - our Spartans are a little soft but quite good after storage in a refrigerator bin for the last 3 months and stored in the cellar for 2 months before that – up until Christmas we also had Jonagolds and Golden Delicious
2) Frozen blueberries, strawberries, raspberries and blackberries - the blueberries and strawberries I bought locally and then froze
3) Frozen apple juice
4) Dried prunes, apples and pears - some apples from previous years
5) Canned pears and prunes
6) Gooseberry, currant and medlar preserves

Vegetables in storage:
1) Onions, garlic and shallots
2) Potatoes
3) Sunchokes
4) Squash, including Delicatas
5) Pumpkins
6) Celery
7) Canned tomatoes and chutney
8) Pickled beets and peppers
9) Beets in a refrigerator from last fall
10) Sauerkraut in a refrigerator from last fall (non-pasteurized to preserve the raw enzymes)
11) Frozen broccoli, cauliflower, sweet corn, green beans, leek tops (for soup), squash and pumpkin
12) Peppers dried and frozen
13) Sprouts grown in the house (alfalfa, lentil, radish, etc.)

Vegetables stored in the field:
1) Potatoes – just about done now
2) Beets
3) Carrots
4) Leeks
5) Shallots
6) Parsnips
7) Brussels sprouts
8) Kale – good nearly all winter
9) Chard – freezes out in December but will come back from the roots this month

Grains and dry beans:
1) Wheat – both spring and winter wheat
2) Barley
3) Spelt
4) Kidney, cannelini, navy and other dry beans
5) Favas
6) Bread in freezer made from our own grain

Animal products:
1) Beef in freezer bought by the quarter from a local farmer
2) Milk – bought at the supermarket but available locally
3) Eggs from a neighbor – several sources within a mile or two

Herbs:
1) Rosemary, dried and fresh in a pot
2) Thyme, marjoram, oregano, coriander, celery seed and tops – all dried

There you have it. There is an abundance of local food available, even now at the end of winter.

Comments on the Economist Food Edition

2011-03-01T10:46:00.000-08:00

In its Feb. 24th print edition, The Economist featured a special report on The Future of Food. The driver for this set of articles was the projection of world population increasing to 9 billion by 2050. Of course the analysis was reality-based but the solutions were all about GMO and other technology-driven solutions, as befits one of the major apologists for the status quo in business media. Here is the last paragraph in the article "A Prospect of Plenty."

"There are plenty of reasons to worry about food: uncertain politics, volatile prices, hunger amid plenty. Yet when all is said and done, the world is at the start of a new agricultural revolution that could, for the first time ever, feed all mankind adequately. The genomes of most major crops have been sequenced and the benefits of that are starting to appear. Countries from Brazil to Vietnam have shown that, given the right technology, sensible policies and a bit of luck, they can transform themselves from basket cases to bread baskets. That, surely, is cause for optimism."

Here are the problems with this kind of Thatcherite/Reaganista, glass half-full optimism.

1) It is not likely the world will ever get up to 9 billion humans by 2050, simply because we have overshot the carrying capacity of the planet. The ONLY thing that has allowed us to stay above the carrying capacity of 1.5 billion humans is the reserve of cheap oil that is running out. Right now we have passed peak oil and the remaining oil will NOT be cheap. This means the ONE THING that has allowed the human population to get so high is going away. This will result in higher oil prices and therefore higher food prices, more problems of distribution because of greed and graft, more refugees crossing borders and the resulting border wars, and more hunger overall. This will result in die-off, probably starting sometime this year, as we reach the tipping point where global hunger from poor distribution gives way to global hunger from inadequate cereal grain production. It is more likely we will be down to 1.5 billion humans on the planet in 2050, than that we are up to 9 billion. Another possibility is that we are in the midst of long-term population reduction in 2050, whatever that figure might be. I fully expect that, before I die, I will see the world population return to where it was when I was 18, around 3 billion.

2) GMO's require an awful lot of R&D, which is itself dependent on cheap oil. After all, labs are just like industry in general and thus huge energy consumers. As oil goes up in price, so too the lab products (whether it is plastics or GMO's) will go up in price. This will effectively price GMO's out of the market. This does not even take into account the extra time, machinery and petrol needed to apply the GMO seed and manage it by increasingly expensive herbicides.

3) Nor do GMO's work well under field conditions. They are specialized experiments that have a short shelf life - witness the necessity for Roundup 2 on the market now because the first Roundup is no longer working as well as it used to, even 4 years ago. Obviously GMO's are not a long-term solution, but rather a short-term solution. Therefore, assuming that GMO's can solve a long-term problem is just bad logic.

4) Nor is technology a solution. Every development in technology takes either more energy or more infrastructure. For example, the diamond frame road bike made of 531 double-butted steel and using derailleur gearing is the most efficient bicycle design ever made, but it requires paved roads to be a viable transportation solution. Going with mountain bike designs obviates the need for paved roads, but the bikes themselves are less energy efficient, both in their manufacture and in the amount of energy needed to get from point A to point B. The best technology is still that which lies closest to human bipedalism. Using a wheelbarrow to move hay bales is MUCH more efficient than loading them onto a pickup, etc.

All in all, we should not expect The Economist to really say something that would undermine the prevailing business model nor really offer locally-based solutions. Nevertheless, that is what we have to do.

Here We Go Again

2011-02-28T12:24:00.000-08:00

When the price of crude oil rose in 2008 and concomitant price shocks turned into gaps on store shelves (even in Wal-Mart!), nearly all the experts blamed the "housing bubble." There were no economists of whom I was aware that correctly traced the worldwide economic downturn to the worldwide peak in oil production of 2008. [If you look at a production graph, you can see a peak in 2005, slight dips in 2006 and 2007, and a slightly higher peak in 2008. There was a significant downturn in 2009 and a slight uptick in 2010.] There were some signals in July 2008 that investment in increased production was available, but could find no takers. Some analysts (mostly engineers) seized on this as indicative of a lack of production capabilities. In other words the money was there, but not the increased supply to use the money. This constituted indirect evidence for the peak. We now know that this analysis was correct.

When I started reading Canadian economist Jeff Rubin's books and articles in 2009, I found that he had correctly predicted the near-crash in 2008 based on declining oil supply. He also explained the relationship of oil to a growing economy. As oil goes up in price, demand falls and this leads to recessionary pressures. When oil falls enough in price, demand increases and worldwide economies can grow again. However, this cycle is on an ever-increasing price slope. Now just as he predicted, oil is rising in price, based on falling supply. This time, the supply is falling because of political turmoil in Libya. Though Libya produces less than 2% of daily worldwide production (1.2 million barrels per day), their oil is what's called "light, sweet crude," a lighter oil than Saudi Arabia's high sulfur oil. Libya's lighter crude requires less energy to refine. Troubles in Algeria (1.3 million barrels per day) are also contributing to the higher prices and they also produce "light, sweet crude." Egypt is a net importer of oil, which is why the month-long disturbances had little impact on oil prices in the last few weeks. Libya is an example of thepower of small percentages in the total demographic.

[Sidebar: Back in the late 1950's and early 1960's there were quite a few articles about "outlaw bikers" and this threatened the emerging market for small, trendy motorcycles in the US (like Hondas and Yamahas). Motorcycle riders' associations took great pains to portray Hells Angels and their ilk as a small percentage of motorcycle riders. The relevant quote was, "Only 1% of motorcycle riders are troublemakers." This caused the Hells Angels to design a patch which said "1%-er," which they wore proudly. Of course, the Hells Angels and other biker clubs got a LOT of publicity for their small number of members and several movies were produced in Hollywood and shown at the local drive-ins around the country. Jack Nicholson was in Hells Angels on Wheels in 1967 and Peter Fonda was in Wild Angels in 1966 before they both appeared in Easy Rider in 1969. The effect on American culture of a tiny minority of motorcycle riders illustrates the power of small percentages in the overall demographic. By the way, we can see the "Hells Angels effect" still rippling through American culture in all the upper middle class twits seen riding $35,000 Harley-Davidsons on the roads, all dolled up in their fancy leathers and scruffy beards. These are NOT the same people who ride a used Honda 500 to work because it gets 50 miles to the gallon.]

If Algeria blows up, the effect of a small percentage in the overall demographic will be magnified by much more than a factor of two. The effect of BOTH Algeria and Libya experiencing a 25-50% reduction in production will likely push crude oil prices up to around $200 and one securities firm, Nomura, is already warning of this possibility. Right now Algeria's President Bouteflika seems to be smart enough to buy more wheat on the world market and lift the 19-year-old state of emergency in order to tamp down dissent. These are better tactics than the usual "outnumber the demonstraters by a factor of 10-1 with special police," the usual Algerian governmental response. A couple of small changes might give his government breathing room for a few months.

I'm Back!

2011-02-27T14:19:00.000-08:00

For the past year I have been blogging on Transition Whatcom, but I decided I would prefer to blog here again. Lots of reasons for my decision, which I may allude to in the future. At any rate, I have lots of blogs I can post on this site, in case you haven't read any of my blogs for the past year. I also did quite a few blogs on Local Harvest (under the F.A. Farm tab) since my last blog here in April 2009, so I may post quite a few of them here also.

I have directly observed a change in the flow of the cosmos in the last couple of months. It isn't as simple as hope coming out of Egypt, nor the sense of opportunity arising out of a permanent recession scenario. ["Hazards are risks and risks are chances." Sandy Denny, Stranger to Himself (1975)]. Rather, the flow is similar to what I experienced circa 1965-1966. I find myself appreciating early Grateful Dead songs and feeling young again. I even woke up the other morning with an urge to put Anthem of the Sun (1968) and Aoxomoxoa (1969) on the turntable. [Of course, I put the double cassette on instead, since I haven't had an album collection since 1973.]

It can be argued that we have many troubles and the post-peak oil future we are now inhabiting (Surprise! Surprise! Snuck up on you, didn't it?) calls for putting our shoulders to the wheel and making tough decisions. However, we cannot just divorce ourselves from the flow. As I learned from aikido, "Align yourself with the universe and it will protect you." The essence of this is contained in one of the lines from "Mountains of the Moon" on the Aoxomoxoa album, "The earth will see you all through this time." Another bit of advice I learned from the co-op movement in Minneapolis and the CO troubles (the commies versus the anarchists - the liberals won) in 1976. This was simply that you don't have to cop-out to the existing mainstream power structure's solutions. There is always a creative solution.

Today was cold and windy so I did some baking. I did a quadruple batch of pumpkin bread, so I will have plenty to put into the freezer for later. In addition to my own pumpkin, I also used the leftover spelt/wheat flour from yesterday's bread baking. I have been making all our bread for 15 years now, but yesterday was the first time I used only the flour from grain I had grown myself. [Usually I do 3 pounds homegrown grain and 2 pounds commercial whole wheat flour for four loaves - a month's supply.] Since I ground this flour yesterday, it had to be used up as quickly as possible and refrigerated, since it is not toasted like commercial flour. As I made the pumpkin bread, I tried listening to the radio, but there was only the usual Sunday nonsense and the classical station was mired in insipid minuet music. So it was that I put on another Grateful Dead album I am appreciating again, Live Dead (1969). As I did my work and listened to the album, I started thinking about an incident I had in 2001 on a motorcycle trip.

After 9/11, I decided to take a motorcycle trip to the southwest and Colorado and take the mood of the country. What I found was that people were not freaked out by the collapse of the Twin Towers and the attack on the Pentagon. There were gallon jars in every convenience store for donations to survivors of the attacks, but there was no fear, nor savage calls for retribution against the Muslims. That would come later and would require a concerted effort from the Bush administration to spread fear into every corner of American life.

While I was touring through Idaho in 2001, on my way to Utah and Colorado, I happened to talk to a motorist at a rest stop. He took great pains to tell me about his failure to negotiate a turn some years in the past, which put him in a hospital and left some permanent damage. The real reason for his accident - and he realized this - was that he didn't trust his bike and the gyroscopic force which holds you up in the turns. For those of you who don't ride, when you want to go right, you push right on the handlebars. This pressure on the gyroscope force of a two-wheeled conveyance causes the bike to go right. In other words, push right to go right. This is much more secure than just leaning over, as the gyroscopic force comes from the wheels, near ground level. Just leaning over is at a higher level, as your body is higher than the wheels. When you use your gyroscopic force to turn the bike, you feel as if you are turning with your hips and feel at one with the bike. In my present bike which is very well-engineered, I basically think left or right and the bike follows. Of course, the more you ride, the more you do by "feel."

On my 2001 trip, I had occasion to remember the story this fellow at the rest stop had told me. I was in Colorado and had come into a turn too fast. The road turned right and on the left side of the road was a sheer drop of several hundred feet. Obviously, I couldn't just go off the road without dying. What I had to do was push harder and harder on the handlebars to get the bike to heel over and I made the turn quite handily. The feeling of heeling over at speed was tremendous, which doubtless explains a lot of the fascination of motorcycle racing. After this turn, I have had more confidence on my bike - and more confidence in the "flow." [Sidebar: This was a different bike than the one I have now. It was quite a bit more high-centered and had shaft drive, so it didn't "dig" as much as a bike with chain drive, as I have now. I had to actively push against the bars on the old bike.]

The gyroscopic flow on a bike heeling over for a corner is the same flow I have felt sailing when I was in synch with the tiller and sails through the medium of the boat. This is the cosmic flow writ small. Obviously, when we are talking about the cosmic flow, it is so large and all-encompassing, it is hard to pick up on it. Nevertheless, it is a palpable force right now. I am picking up on it again, just like in the mid-to-late 1960's. More on this later.

Psychological Stressors Are Already Arising

2009-04-09T09:38:00.000-07:00

Today's Seattle Times (4/9/09) had a front page story on middle-class types stressing out because of the recession, even though they still have jobs and property. Here is a comment; "I felt like a neurotic middle-class, middle-aged woman too weak to deal with life on my own. I should be stronger, it was simply money, and why do I have to take pills to not worry about money."

This little quote is an example of one of the variables about the current economic restructuring and the upcoming peak oil problem that is only minimally appreciated. People usually pay lip service to psychological variables, but hardly ever factor them into their vision or future calculations. There are those of us, however, who do treat the psychological response as an independent variable that will also have an interaction with the other variables of supply disruptions, inflationary pressures, governmental impotence, etc. In point of fact, the psychological responses of billions of people will likely shorten the timeline of crisis, from 20 years to 10 years. In other words, based solely on peak oil, we are likely to face an accelerating dieoff, starting in 2030. However, factoring in the psychological responses, especially those from privileged middle-class Americans and Europeans (who have a broader impact because of their broader access to resources), we are likely to get a dieoff starting in 2020 AND this dieoff is likely to accelerate faster.

So, what to do? My response is always the same.
1) Grow some of your own food
2) Buy food directly from local farmers that you trust. If you don't know any, get off your duff and find some.
3) Make choices when you shop at the store.

Some people have thought of moving to different parts of the country, but this alternative has been closed off by a frozen real estate and job market. A better path to follow is to stay where you are and build community with those you know and like. Starting all over in a new place may still be a viable option for those who are really destitute, but for most of us, we have resources all around us of which we are not aware. I suggest you extend yourself and take a look around. The bottom line is this may alleviate your anxieties. Perhaps the middle-class anxiety attacks are really caused by a lack of community.

Obama in Europe

2009-04-04T09:47:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I opened my copy of the Seattle Times and was amazed to see a photo of President Obama flashing the peace sign during his press conference at the G-20 meeting. According to the article, when he finished his hour-long meeting with the press, the reporters stood up and cheered him as he exited. Amazing. He reminds me of one of my cousins back in Minnesota. He was a rather squirrely little fellow, but he had the amazing ability to fall into a pile of manure and get back up smelling like a rose - time after time after time.

Prior to Obama's visit, many of the pundits predicted he would meet substantial resistance from European leaders. Since most Europeans have substantially better safety nets - due to better unemployment systems, universal health care, a smaller drag on the economy because of lower prison populations, a smaller drag on the economy because of smaller defense budgets, a larger percentage of personal savings and more extensive family networks - the worldwide recession started by the US credit crunch has not impacted the Europeans to the same extent as the Americans. Thus, it was feared the European leaders would push for massive concessions because of their strong bargaining position. However, Mr. Charismatic blew that idea right out of the water and soon a photo of Obama, Berlusconi and Medvedev was making the rounds, with Obama giving the thumbs up signal. It looked like a frat boy picture!

Of course, the devil is in the details and there is still a lot of behind-the-scenes negotiating to do, but these conferences are really about the photo-ops and the speeches. In that context, Obama once again pulled off a major publicity/diplomacy coup. If I wasn't such a cynic, I might even be proud of him. Hell, I AM proud of him. He has done his job once again.

The Synthesis of Hip and Radical

2009-04-01T10:19:00.000-07:00

Back in the late 60's and early 70's, a synthesis of hip and radical became necessary. After the air-brushed photo of Charles Manson on the cover of Life magazine December 19, 1969, every flower child became an instant satanic killer in the minds of the public. A wonderful Christmas present for a segment of the population (i.e. the hippies) that had already become disenfranchised by stormtrooper tactics on a daily basis, wouldn't you say? This is not just revisionist bosh, by the way. The basis of this statement is personal experience, an explanation of the techniques used by a commercial artist, and a subjective sample of articles in both the mainstream media and the underground newspapers at the time. By the fall of 1969, the killing at Altamont had already happened and the mainstream media was calling for the death of the counterculture (by hanging if need be). This pre-Christmas attempt by Life magazine to sway public opinion was quite a savvy attempt to polarize the populace in the same manner as Vice-President Agnew's numerous diatribes. Then, during the winter and spring of 1970, President Nixon attempted to escalate the Vietnam War to Cambodia, the first Earth Day was held, and the murders at Kent State and Jackson State brought the War home with a vengeance. Clearly, a crux point in the Movement had been reached. A song from the Grateful Dead caught the tenor of the times quite well.
"I don't know, but I've been told
If a horse don't pull, you've got to carry the load.
I don't know whose back's that strong,
Maybe find out before too long."
- New Speedway Boogie (Jerry Garcia/Robert Hunter - from the album Workingman's Dead, 1970)
NOTE: This song was actually about the Altamont incident.

What happened then was that many people in the counterculture decided their backs were indeed strong enough and started working in several directions at once. The student radicals found out that there was a pool of committed hippies out there, ready to put their energy into concrete solutions. The hippies, in turn, found out that the student radicals were not just former "clean for Gene" pseudo-intellectuals who had traded their horn-rimmed glasses for a pair of Lennon look-alikes and a cheap copy of Mao's Little Red Book purchased from the Black Panthers. This synthesis was quite important and helped along by the realization that yes, the cops and National Guardsmen will shoot you and the rest of America will cheer them on.

Out of this synthesis, centered around 1970, came the co-op movement, the back-to-the-land movement, the environmental movement, the anti-nuclear movement, the organic food movement, and the feminist movement. [Sorry if I missed your movement, but I am just commenting on the ones with which I have experience.] Of course, all these movements existed well before 1970, but in much smaller numbers. After the winter and spring of 1969-1970, both the number of participants and the sheer volume of energy increased exponentially. It was like yeast when a sugar-rich medium reaches a certain temperature - it blooms explosively (and yes, I cribbed this analogy from The Sea Wolf by Jack London).

So, why bother with this bit of countercultural history at this point in time? Simply put, we face a major crisis. Once again, we need a synthesis. I do a lot of posting on both the Local Harvest forum and this blog, as well as another blog. I am a member of two listservs that deal with postmodern agriculture - one local, one national. I also have an informal circle of like-minded folks who send me forwarded emails and articles that bear on the problems we face today. The problem is multi-faceted, but the downfall of the US economy seems to be a valid blanket term. The solution is to feed ourselves locally, since we may not be able to get grapes from Chile, or oranges from Australia. Thus the locavore movement. Currently, there seem to be two trends in this movement. One is the earth-friendly trend that gravitates towards biodynamics and subjective solutions to subjective analyses. The other is the scientific trend, which takes a hard-nosed objective approach to solving food problems and comes up with objective answers. These objective answers do NOT include GMO's by the way, since they are not sustainable in the long run. The synthesis of these two trends, or streams, or ways of thinking about the problem, seems to be that they are both flowing towards the same solutions. The solution really is sustainable agriculture, which I see as postmodern - a reaction to modern petroleum-intensive agriculture. So, just as we needed a solution in 1970 - we had to see whose back was strong - we now need a synthesis of the subjective and the objective to solve an even more pressing problem. If the peak oil folks are right in their predictions, your children and grandchildren will face a much tougher world than we did in the 1970's. We need to pull together.

Rats in Yorkshire and the Implications of Fall Tilling

2009-03-26T09:36:00.000-07:00

The Independent (Britain's best newspaper) had an article today (March 26th) on the rat problem in Flamborough, Yorkshire. Here's a blurb.

The main cause, argues the National Pest Technicians Association (NPTA), is the decision of local authorities to start charging up to £100 a time to deal with rat problems within their borders. Fortnightly bin collections and the decomposing mountains of discarded takeaway food that litter our streets are also to blame. But the well-intentioned householder must also shoulder some responsibility. Inadequately covered compost bins, the allotment boom and over-stocked bird feeders are fuelling the problem. In Flamborough, it's the weather that's to blame. Waterlogged and snow-covered fields over winter meant local farmers were unable to plough in the rotting stubble, unwittingly providing an unlimited food source for this ever-opportunistic and resourceful rodent.

One householder also blamed the practice of shooting hawks. On our farm, we have a plethora of sky-born predators and they are constantly patrolling the fields. We also have cats who bring in a big fat vole every so often, as well as the occasional unwary robin.

The problem of rubble that provides cover and food for rodents is one aspect that postmodern farmers might want to consider further. I do some fall tilling as it disturbs the slug eggs and allows me to get in the fields a few days earlier in the spring. This is a tradeoff as there is a question of erosion, even with my flat ground. I am not totally committed to fall tilling, however. I am pointing this out as an example of the multiple variables inherent in every farming decision. Growing up on the farm in Minnesota, it was more of a time question than an erosion question. If you are still picking corn in November, there is no time to plow. Nowadays, I do some of both.

The Long Descent

2009-03-10T12:52:00.000-07:00

There seem to be two extremes to the resolution of the peak oil problem. One extreme says everything is fine because we humans will come up with a creative solution that will allow us to continue in our merry wasteful lifestyle. The other extremes says civilization will end in a rush and we will be thrust into a post-apocalyptic world where mere survival is all we have. As usual, the truth is somewhere between the two extremes - in short, a long descent (Greer, 2008) or a long emergency (Kunstler, 2006). Both ideas have validity and argue for the same solutions.
1) Build community
2) Grow some of your own food
3) Consume less
4) Don't burn your bridges
These suggestions seem bloody obvious don't they? Unfortunately, we have to hammer at them over and over again, especially as the mainstream society seems bound and determined to isolate everyone in their own cocoon. For those of us who were adults in the 1960's and 1970's, we have seen this movie before. What's different this time is that our good ideas can come to fruition.

Restructuring Again

2009-02-22T11:40:00.001-08:00

One of the keys to the first Bush recession in 2001 was that the economy went through a period of restructuring. That is, a large number of jobs went away but never came back when the economy improved. I got caught in this because I had gone to grad school to train as a community college instructor. When I started looking for work in February 2001, there seemed to be plenty of jobs but I watched them disappear before my eyes as the economy tanked in the next few months. Many of the community colleges I applied to put up an announcement for full-time professors and then cut the position within a month or two. This was bad management on the part of the public institution of course, but there was a rapidity to the economic downturn that argued for a fundamental difference in the marketplace. This was confirmed by several pundits within the next year and it became commonplace to talk about a restructuring in the job market.

In this 2nd Bush recession, I see even more restructuring. What is happening now is that people are not consuming indiscriminately, based on their shallow desires - desires, I might add, that are reinforced by TV. Now the American consumer is actually looking to see if they need something. Of course, some people still buy SUV's and big-screen TV's, but the amount of nonsense buying is decreasing. This is a restructuring simply because our economy NEEDS to be overheated in order to work properly. In other words, the American consumer needs to be profligate to keep US economic hegemony alive.

What will be the effects of this restructuring - of a general downturn in consumerism? First of all, there will be fewer and fewer phoney-baloney jobs and city/county/state budgets will suffer. Secondly, gas prices should rise gradually and traffic flows should stabilize - thus negating the cries of noxious developers, both public and private, to build more roads. Thirdly, greenhouse gas emissions are likely to stabilize in a steady growth curve rather than an exponential growth curve. Developing countries, like China, are already seeing some return to rural areas of the people previously displaced to cities to toil in sweat shops so an American consumer could buy yet another pair of running shoes or another t-shirt. Less buying means less smokestack emissisons. Finally, the sense of despair will generally increase, but it will be difficult to spot. People in despair don't seem to be the ones making noise. They are just sitting over there in the corner, nursing the only beer they can afford. Kind of reminds you of the 1970's doesn't it?

Bipartisanship Is For Saps

2009-02-18T09:24:00.000-08:00

Yesterday's (February 17th) New York Times had a wonderful quote from President Obama about bipartisanship, "I'm an eternal optimist. That doesn't mean I'm a sap." Let me take this to the next level and say that "Bipartisanship is for saps."

Another nuanced view was provided from a letter writer to the Times (Chris Howell from Oberlin, Ohio - obviously an astute political observer) in the same issue who had asserted that bipartisanship is a mistake for three reasons: 1) It assumes a willing partner [this is obviously not happening], 2) It assumes solutions to the nation's ills lie somewhere in the middle of the political spectrum - whereas our most pressing problems require radical solutions [there's that "radical" term again!], and 3) Bipartisanship of this kind thwarts the will of the people - Republican ideas and political practices were decisively rejected at the polls in November [once again astute and correct].

My own take on bipartisanship is much simpler. I see the flirting with bipartisanship as sophisticated gamesmanship on the part of the President. In his first 3 weeks in office, he extended himself to the Repooplicans and they rebuffed him. In other words, they fell into a trap. Now, President Obama can just go ahead and implement his agenda and not worry about the right-wingers. I agree with his tactics - they exhibit a nuance that has been sorely missed. I also discussed both views on bipartisanship with my significant other this morning and, as usual, she provided a sophisticated added component to my rather pragmatic battlefield tactical assessment. Toni's contribution was that "Compromise is a flawed political approach." [I like it!] "Compromise is a wishy-washy conglomeration that doesn't solve the overriding problem." [Outstanding!]

Together, Toni and I came to a consensus of the following:
1) Elect a person with an agenda BUT keep him (or her) honest
2) This requires the citizens to criticize, criticize, criticize
3) That's how a modern democracy functions.

I might add that last night I went to the Ferndale City Council meeting and lambasted the proposed "more money for the police" proposal. I will probably be roundly criticized for it but it is what we all need to do. We elected this City Council to make things better, but we must constantly hold their feet to the fire. We need to do this at the state and federal level also. I don't enjoy being a gadfly, but it is something we need to do. I think all public employees, elected, hired or appointed, need to be constantly looking over their shoulders. If they develop a facial tic from too much criticism, that is all well and good.

Put Your Hope in Youth - Hah!

2009-02-05T10:15:00.000-08:00

Recently, a noted author was interviewed on NPR and she discussed the troubles in her own country, as well as her adopted country, which is the US. After a relatively depressing analysis of current problems in both countries, her final rejoinder was, "I put my hope in the youth." My response is "Hah!" In this country at least, young people have no idea of their recent history. They don't have even a simplistic view of the Vietnam War, much less a nuanced view. They don't have any idea of what the economy was like before Reaganomics. They don't have any idea of what the 1960's were really about, and they don't read history. What strikes me as a fundamental shift is that we, the Baby Boomers, must continue to struggle against the stultifying mass culture, as well as government, at all levels. We really cannot cede the high ground. To be blunt, us "dirty hippies" were right, and the Newt Gingriches of the world will never forget it, nor forgive us. However, history and inevitability are on our side. The good ideas we had in 1969 are now doable and we should not shirk or pass the mantle on to the Gen Xers simply because we are tired or old. We need to get up every morning and do something positive. When that is done, we need to do something else that is positive. It is really quite simple.

Blogging Comes of Age

2009-02-02T16:26:00.000-08:00

A few days ago, I read a piece written by a Professor of Public Affairs titled, "Blogging No Substitute for Daily Newspaper." Of course, the first thing you should be thinking is, "Well, blogging must be a mature art if the hoity-toity professor types have discovered it." The second thing you may be thinking is, "What's his angle?" (The professor's angle, not mine - mine is to create buzz, but you know that already.) Simply put, the professor's angle is that the newspaper in which he has an occasional guest column is shutting down operations and he is losing a forum. However, he would not be a tenured professor if he did not try a little spin to obfuscate the issue. And so it was spun. One of his comments was that the press serves a watchdog function. The supposed benefit is that journalists are a trained cadre of professional observers of human affairs. This would be a noble sentiment if that were actually so. However, my experience of the press is that they are trained all right - trained to write a biased account for their own purposes. Make no mistake, journalistic writing is exciting to read if it is done well. Tom Wolfe's novels are an example of journalistic style transposed onto a longer, broader format, and he does it quite well. Even his crappy books read well. However, since I have been at demonstrations and other public events over the last forty years and not once had them reported as I actually witnessed them, I have come to the conclusion that the trained observer is not using his training to report, but to spin the truth into a grand narrative.

Another point the professor made was that without news organizations providing outside analysis, we would be at the mercy of press releases and news conferences. This argument is so laughable it is not worth addressing. We have been at the mercy of press releases and news conferences for the last 8 years, at least! I don't see either the reporters or the newspaper editors suddenly growing spines just because we have a new President.

What a newspaper means for me is a large amount of chaff that is deposited every morning. I drink my coffee and page through it, looking for grains of wheat. There is usually one or two, but the papers I read are really just shills for "truth, justice, and the American Way." You know, if I wanted a daily dose of 1950's Superman-style tripe, I could get it for free on the Internet. As it is, my daily paper is going broke and will cease publishing next month. I will have a little bit of adjustment, but I think I will survive. DISCLAIMER: I don't watch TV, so I will not be getting my news from that source. I will still listen to NPR on the radio, however. They are not that much different from the quasi-liberal phoney baloney newspapers, but there are occasional grains of wheat amongst the chaff. And the radio can be in the background as I do other work.

Global Warming Produces Climate Volatility - Duh!

2009-01-26T13:49:00.000-08:00

I just finished reading an article from the Independent (Britain's best newspaper) called "Heavy Weather: What Climate Change Really Means for Britain." The gist of this article is that global warming/climate change is now expressing itself in weather pattern volatility. My reaction to this is "Duh!" People were made aware of these kinds of problems 40 years ago, when the environmental movement really took off, in the USA as well as Britain. To suddenly discover that global warming does NOT mean a steady and predictable rise in annual temperatures, is rather disingenuous. Reputable scientists have been warning about unpredictable events induced by pollution and smog, as well as global warming, for many years. In addition, the "dirty hippies" have been warning about these kinds of events and trends for over 40 years. Even though they were branded as environmental extremists, they proved to be right.

How did it happen, then, that the "dirty hippies" were right, and the "objective" economists and policy-makers were wrong? I suggest to you that it is the triumph of the subjective over the objective. As another example, we didn't know what problems would surface about genetically-modified organisms (GMO's), but we didn't trust scientists attempting an end run around Darwinism in the labs. In short, even an F1 hybrid is subject to phenotypic selection and the process of mechanical hand-fertilization allows the physical environment to intrude at some level. This does not happen when anchovy DNA is inserted into strawberry cells in the lab. Genetic selection alone does not cut it. In Europe, GMO's have not been proven absolutely safe over a long timeline, so European governments do not allow GMO corn and soybeans into their markets. Notice that the idea of a long timeline and safety are both subjective concepts. Safety is obviously subjective, as it means safe for humans and their favored "friend" species. However, the idea of a long timeline is also subjective, simply because we use a long timeline as a proxy for natural selection. In other words, we subjectively say that if a species is still around, it must be doing something right. Another way of putting this is to allow a mutation enough time to move from randomness into an essential trait. Another point is that even though we measure a timeline in objective units, the origin of the concept is something we subjectively value. This is similar to Karl Popper's idea of refutability. If we cannot test a proposition so that we can either refute or confirm, it is not scientific. However, the idea that we adhere to this definition is itself subjective. I probably do not do as good a job as the writers on the history of science, but I think you get my drift. Even an objective measurement is subjectively chosen by us. Clearly the subjective trumps the objective.

Back to our views on climate change. Subjectively, we know that we should use as little energy as possible. We know that we should expect pertubation in the weather system if we pump a lot of greenhouse gases into the global weather system in a short period of time. We know that driving a gas-guzzler is not only expensive, but detrimental to the health of the global weather system. We can measure it and measure it, using objective criteria such as carbon footprints and calorie usage, but we still know we are doing the wrong thing. It really is a question of adopting a lower profile in our relationship to the world. All of our activities have a cost. Even this blog contributes to energy usage in the aggregate, especially as larger server farms use a hell of a lot of electricity to keep the Internet on tap 24/7. So . . . we do what we can.

Forty Years Ago on the Washington Mall

2009-01-20T14:15:00.000-08:00

This morning, Toni and I went into town to watch the Inauguration with our buddies at the Stein. When we walked in, the first view I saw on the TV was from the Capitol, looking out down the mall towards the Washington Monument. It was packed solid and I couldn't help remarking on the last time I had seen such a crowd. It was during the largest anti-war demonstration in Washington, November 11, 1969. Actual crowd estimates for the Inauguration were over 1 million people, crowded shoulder-to-shoulder into this space. The exact same area was filled just as full on that day in 1969. While I was at that demonstration nearly 40 years ago, I happened to talk to a newsman from one of the major TV networks. He said the crowd was easily twice as large as at Woodstock, just a few months earlier. Of course, the official estimates ranged from 200,000 to 400,000 - one of the usual lies promulgated during the Vietnam antiwar era. It was commonplace to be at a demonstration, for example, and see police beat men and women bloody for no reason. Then the news on TV that night would say only police were injured by those nefarious demonstrators. The news media isn't much better in 2009, but now we at least have a President who seems to have some brains.

It is always a source of pride to me that both Toni and I made the journey to Washington in 1969 to be at that demonstration. We didn't meet until almost 30 years later, but we were in synch, even back then. She traveled from New York City - I traveled from Minneapolis. I sold my truck to have enough money to buy a bus ticket. Yet, the day after the demonstration, President Nixon trumpeted the fact that he had received 10,000 telegrams supporting his conduct of the Vietnam War. 10,000 - only 10,000! On that day, over a million people came from all over the US, taking time from their jobs and their studies, undergoing hardship paying for their tickets and traveling to Washington. When they got there, they were teargassed and attacked by the police for their efforts. Yet, this massive demonstration of public opinion willing to actually travel to the seat of power was negated by 10,000 people who only had to go down to a telegraph office in their hometown! This is an example of the skewed priorities and disrespect that those against the war were subjected to in 1969. Now, we are stuck in another unjust war that benefits only a few multinational corporations and kills hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians so that greedy Americans can drive their SUV's for a few years longer. Hopefully, this new President will realize that the smart course of action is to end the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars as quickly as possible. Make no mistake, I am holding President Obama responsible from this moment on.

Shifting Cultivation vs. Intensive Cultivation

2009-01-13T19:44:00.000-08:00

I got a new world atlas today and I took a look at agricultural patterns around the world. There are still huge areas on the equator that are categorized as shifting cultivation - South America, Africa and East Asia. Coincidentally, I have been looking at cultivation patterns through both a human geographical and an anthropological perspective. There are basically five adaptive strategies for procuring food in human culture. They are:
Foraging aka (also known as) hunting/gathering
Horticulture aka shifting cultivation
Agriculture aka intensive cultivation
Pastoralism aka herding
Industrialism aka agribusiness

Hunting and gathering has been our birthright as humans (i.e. the genus Homo) for the past 2 million years or so. It was only in the last 10,000 years that we became farmers - cultivating crops instead of just foraging for them. There are a lot of theories on why humans started cultivation, but I lean towards random mutations (for example in wheat) plus human agency (phenotypic selection and some random glitches such as throwing out seeds on the garbage piles).

The important question for me right now is not the origins of agriculture, but how efficient the different modes are. For example, foraging is quite efficient because there is no planting nor weeding. There is just harvest. Back when I was a migrant worker, I did something similar. I traveled around and just picked. I started with cherries in May or June and then worked straight through early, middle and late cherries, peaches, pears and then apples, including late apples. I also pruned during the winter, so the analogy is not perfect, but you get my point.

Horticulture, or shifting cultivation, is another interesting pattern, but it is characterized by leaving fields fallow at some point when soil fertility is diminished. Slash-and-burn, or swidden is characteristic of this kind of cultivation, but it is only effective with small populations. Another downside is that villagers sometimes have to walk quite a distance to get out to their fields, which can be inefficient. It is interesting that this is still a primary subsistence model in equatorial regions around the globe. In my atlas, the complementary mode in African equatorial regions was herding, or pastoralism. As with horticulture, pastoralism is only effective with small populations but there is another downside - large tracts of land are needed for the herds. This is a big problem in Africa now, since there are so many wars and population pressures.

Intensive cultivation, or what the anthropologists call non-industrial agriculture, is all about feeding larger rural populations. Of course, this requires fertility amendments to be made to the soil. It also requires more labor, since land is often worked with animals, irrigated and/or terraced. Since the fields are not shifting season-to-season, there is also a chance to spread out population more and cut down on travel time for farmers. An ancillary benefit is that group members, such as children and the aged can more easily participate in cultivation practices when there is no great distance to the fields.

Industrial agriculture should properly be called agribusiness, since the emphasis is not on food production for local use, but rather producing a product for a cash sale and competing with other businesses. The soil is just a factory where inputs and outputs are managed and marketed. In point of fact, most agribusiness output is just the first step in value-added products that eventually make their way to cardboard boxes filled with a product that is still called food, but is less nutritious than the raw produce or grain or even the raw meat products.

So what is the point to all this? Simply put, my approach of intensive cultivation on a small plot of land is the most efficient adaptive strategy, as long as I have the labor to produce the food AND I can replenish the soil. Right now that is not a problem, as I use extensive green manures and cover crops, as well bringing in rock powders and other soil amendments. Greensand and other natural soil amendments are still cheap, especially if a farmer can sell more produce at a fair price. It is interesting to note that the real problem is not actually growing the food with human labor and building up the soil, but rather competing with artificially low prices for farm produce in the agribusiness-driven marketplace.

Unemployment Is Worse Than You Think

2009-01-09T09:11:00.000-08:00

Today's news is that the unemployment rate has risen to 7.2%. Of course, this is a flawed metric, simply because it does not count those who have stopped looking for work, or those who are underemployed. The methodology is statistically accurate, as the samples are drawn from defined areas but then randomly chosen. 60,000 households are used and I ran a 95% confidence interval calculation on the percentages. The confidence interval for 7.2% and a sample size of 60K is 7.0% to 7.4%, so the actual numbers presented are within a valid range. However, the basic concepts from the US Bureau of Labor website are the following:
1) People with jobs are employed.
2) People who are jobless, looking for jobs, and available for work are unemployed.
3) People who are neither employed nor unemployed are not in the labor force.
4) Respondents are only in one group.

This is a common problem in trying to wedge subjective subjects (i.e. humans) into objective pigeon-holes (i.e. percent of unemployed). If we were just estimating widgets on a factory production line that had a functional flaw, it would be no problem to give an accurate percentage with a high degree of confidence. However, trying to give a meaningful percentage of unemployed humans who fall into multiple categories - or who are left out of the sample because they do not fit into a politically charged category - is an exercise in futility.

Category 1 is valid - if you have a job you are employed. However, if you have a job that does not provide you with a living wage, you are in deep doo-doo. Category 2 is valid. However, this category is used as an exclusive category rather than an inclusive category. In other words, it defines a minimum. Category 3 is just nonsense because it is an arbitrary category that does not reflect individual situations. As with the widgets, a category is only valid if it corresponds to the items in the category. The problem with the Bureau of Labor methodology is that the category is not defined by the subjects - this is a problem inherent in typology itself and why typology is antithetical to materialism. To be blunt, defining categories arbitrarily is non-objective, but projects a "patina" of objectivity. This is the kind of nonsense we used to argue about in grad school, but it is not appropriate when you deal with real people who cannot find a job. Category/Restriction 4 is nonsense for a similar reason. We are humans, not widgets, and fit into multiple categories.

For these unemployment statistics, the proper statement should be, "The unemployment rate is at a minimum of 7.2% and is likely higher." If the US government would use this subjective tone in their statements, it would have some shred of credibility left. As it is now, no one believes what the government says anymore, and with good reason.

I Am Done With Robert Kaplan

2009-01-08T11:36:00.000-08:00

I am currently trying to read Imperial Grunts by Robert Kaplan (2005) and I couldn't make it past page 114. I am finally done with him, as his formerly nuanced view of US foreign policy has become irrevocably skewed by his right-wing bias. Back in the 1980's I started reading his articles and was quite impressed with his ability to cut to the bone. He had also done quite a bit of on-the-ground coverage in Afghanistan and other places, so he had a good bit of experience behind his journalism. His writing style was very effective and easy to understand. I had read his original article "The Coming Anarchy" in the Atlantic in February, 1994, so when his book length collection of articles came out as The Coming Anarchy (2000), I was looking forward to more trenchant analyses of the Mid-East dilemma. His first articles were well-done, but when I got to "Kissinger, Metternich, and Realism" (pp. 127-55, first published June, 1999), I could not believe what I was reading. For someone who had actually been alive and aware during the Nixon-Kissinger era, the level of spin and misinformed analysis was appalling. I was quite dismayed and I hadn't given Kaplan's work much attention ever since. However, when Imperial Grunts came out, I was interested. I wondered if anyone else would write a book about the new Rumsfeld style of brushfire wars stage-managed by lightly-equipped, specially-trained US elite soldiers, rather than relying on proxy native governments unleashed by US-provided materiel in the Cold War era. No other books came out which had the same depth of research with actual ground soldiers, so I decided recently to get the book and give Kaplan another chance. I shouldn't have bothered.

The first clue should have been the use of "Injun country" to typify a multitude of new frontiers that the Empire needed to keep pushing outwards. Not only is this racist disingenuousness that ignores the realities of 19th century genocide against the Native Americans, it panders to the lowest common denominator of the soldiers he is interviewing. I too could go into hotbeds of low-income white Americans, drink and eat with them, tell dirty jokes, share their meager lifestyles and listen to their inner thoughts - some bigoted and simplistic, some not. However, this does a disservice to those soldiers worse than any knee-jerk liberal diatribe. The working poor who still form the basis of today's all-volunteer army are not necessarily gap-toothed gun lovers who would rather fight amongst each other and need someone to hate so they can blow them away. The level of subliminal racism in this book (against Muslims, the little brown Colombians, even the white redneck southerners) is of the highest order. Kaplan does make a good point that Empire needs cannon fodder and that the surest way to salvage US hegemony is to train elite commandoes and "let them loose." But is this what we want? Not me.

The problem with Rumsfeld, Cheney and the US Armed Forces is not their function. The problem is that the concept of Empire is invalid. If the Army is strictly a defensive force, there is no need for covert operatives. If the US respects the sovereignty of nations, there is no need to have small teams who operate under the cover of darkness and train indigenous government troops to use the same tactics against the very people they are supposed to serve. It is ironic to think of training troops to fight against guerillas who have the support of the population. Kaplan may have read Mao's words on the guerilla swimming like fish in the sea of the populace, but you wouldn't know it by reading his views of the general populace of Colombia, for example.

The worst thing I can say about Kaplan is that he has become irrelevant. He is no longer a journalist with a nuanced view of the breakdown in US foreign policy around the world. He has become just another apologist for the romantic view of US soldiers bringing democracy to the little people around the globe who are too "stupid" to realize globalization is good for them. I am quite disappointed every time I see someone who devalues their work product for partisanship. I am tres disappointed with Kaplan because he had so far to fall.

Move the Center

2009-01-05T12:05:00.000-08:00

I recently finished Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007). The thrust of the book is the damage Milton Friedman's economic theories (usually called monetarism) have done to the world at large. Particular instances are Chile, Argentina, Poland, Russia, Britain, and now the USA. Klein makes a good case for the argument that economic and military shocks have "softened up" whole countries so University of Chicago economists (usually waiting in the wings as in the Pinochet coup in Chile) could destroy government regulatory frameworks, privatize state-run transportation networks, slash social spending, and open up whole countries to exploitation by multinational corporations. Klein was also featured in the December 8, 2008, issue of the New Yorker. In the accompanying photograph to her profile article, she is wearing a button that simply says, "MOVE THE CENTER." I instantly realized what a powerful statement that was and rushed off to get some buttons made up. I ordered two sets of buttons: black lettering on a white background and white lettering on a black background. I am now giving them away to all and sundry and it usually provides an opportunity to make my case.

My argument is simple. The political system in this country has slid so far to the right that a centrist like Obama is actually a Republican. It has been said that Bill Clinton was more of a Republican than Richard Nixon - this denies many of Nixon's crimes, though (such as the coup in Chile in 1973). However, it should be obvious that in this era of Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, it would be nigh impossible for Earl Warren to be even nominated for a seat on the US Supreme Court. There are many other instances of how right-wing the whole US has become since the late 1960s, but I'm sure you get my drift. What we need to do is move the whole center of politics in the US to the left. This would still not bring us into parity with the European countries who are now beginning to eclipse us on the world stage, but it would be a start. Now that the US economy has been "softened up," there are opportunities to make things right (and I don't mean right-wing!). We can use this opportunity to make a much saner and just country. Most people I talk to are well behind the curve in their perceptions of how bad things have become and even farther behind the curve in judging the speed of the downfall of US hegemony. There will be many opportunities to come in the next few months to actually put some community-oriented structures into place. Those of us who are still around from the 1960s need to remember the good ideas we had and make them work this time. The time for spinning our wheels is over.

The Constant Insinuation of Marketing Into Daily Life

2008-12-29T11:17:00.000-08:00

This morning I read a retread article (i.e. reprinted in the Seattle PI) from the New York Times' Jon Pareles on how marketing is changing the way music is written and distributed. Many songwriters now seem to be writing a song, or even whole albums, for marketing hooks, rather than music for its own sake. The relevant quote which prompted today's blog is, "Perhaps it's too 20th century to hope that music could stay exempt from multitasking, or that the constant insinuation of marketing into every moment of consciousness would stop when a song begins." The actual content of the article points up a problem, to be sure. However, the direst comment is rather off the cuff and at the end of the article. This is ". . . the constant insinuation of marketing into every moment of consciousness."

Since I grow vegetables and sell them through direct marketing, I have to deal with marketing issues every day - and it really is a pain. If you want to farm and sell wholesale, there are a huge number of processors and distributors who will give you bottom dollar and make demands on how you deliver the produce to them. Then they will pay you at their convenience. This is the tradeoff for not having to market and this is also the reason the family farm is almost gone. On the other hand, if you want to get top dollar, you have to develop the markets, do the advertising (including writing the copy and loading the photos), find the right advertising medium, persuade people to buy, figure out new ways to beat the transportation traps, and stay on top of the latest trends. This is a hell of a lot of work. If the farmer actually got paid for this, it would be no problem. But all the marketing time and expense comes at the cost of production time and gross sales. We are caught between a rock and a hard place and it certainly doesn't help to have the constant need to market our produce thrown into our faces every day.

Several solutions present themselves. One solution is to get consumers to stop being so passive. People don't plan. They just go to the supermarket when they need food. They then take whatever the chain store has on offer. Most people I know buy at the upscale store in Ferndale that has the brighter lights and the bigger parking lot. The produce and other food products are presented better than the competing store just across the street and down half a block. The downscale store caters to low-income people to a certain extent, but their prices are still much higher than a comparable store in a large metro area, such as Vancouver, WA, where we used to live. One of my sound bites this winter is, "The era of the passive consumer is over." This is based on my predictions on how bad the economy will be by spring. If it does come true that the consumer can no longer afford to be passive, then the consumer will start coming out to the farm to buy, start storing up for winter, buying more when there is a surplus of a certain item, etc.

Another solution is to outsource the marketing, and I am working on this angle with someone who wants to sell my produce along with other items. Outsourcing the selling is a traditional business response to this problem, but it introduces someone else who needs to make a living from my produce, thereby reducing the profit margin for the farm. However, if this releases me to put more time into production, then it is more viable than doing all the marketing myself.

A third solution is to compress sales hours. For example, the Ferndale Farmers Market started the 2008 season with hours of 10:00 am to 3:00 pm. Soon, the vendors with unrealistic ideas of how much foot traffic and sales were really there in Ferndale on a Saturday, started clamoring for a 9:00 am opening. The putative rationale was to cater to those folks who get up early, go for a walk on the Riverwalk, and then go about their business for the rest of the day. Another rationale was to accommodate those folks who have just had breakfast and want to do their shopping on their way home. The point here is that the market vendors made two analytical mistakes. The first was to assume that the more hours you are open, the more sales you make. This assumption is based on still another assumption that prices and sales are elastic. Elasticity in economics means that you can influence price or sales by your own actions. An example is that you can sell more cars if you lower the price. However, produce sales are inelastic, because the amount of food a person can eat is limited by the size of their stomach. Cars are not limited in this fashion, as I can see every day with one of my neighbors, who have at least ten vehicles. My experience as a market vendor for the last four years also argues for a primary sales window of 10:00 am to 3:00 pm during a Saturday. It is nonsense to just be open more hours when it is likely you only drag out the sales over a longer time window.

The second analytical mistake with being open more hours at a Farmers Market is that the Market is still catering to the consumer, not to the producer. This is self-defeating, in that consumers need to become more focused and get out of their passive rut. We need to educate consumers and compress their opportunities to buy, not give them more. In the 1950's, shops were routinely closed on Sundays and people did their shopping on the other six days of the week. It didn't hurt business. In point of fact, giving the seller more time off will enhance their productivity in the hours they are open. Channeling productivity and sales into fewer hours is the real reason for compressing sales hours. This goes hand in hand with making consumers more disciplined. If the era of the passive consumer is truly over (and I think it is), then we have a priceless opportunity to change how things are sold in this country. This also helps to counteract the insinuation of marketing into daily life that I find so distasteful.

We Need More Buses

2008-12-23T10:13:00.000-08:00

The snow and cold have slowed things down, so now I can actually do a little blogging. This morning, I read an article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer from a WashPIRG (Washington Public Interest Research Group) member. The gist of the article is that the car is still the main problem in transportation in the US. Per the article, billions of dollars in productivity are wasted when commuters are stuck in traffic, transportation is now the 2nd biggest item in household budgets (housing is 1st and health care is now 3rd), the transportation system is the chief cause of our addiction to oil, and cars and trucks are the biggest end-user source of global warming pollution (1/3 of the US emissions and 1/2 of Washington's emissions). The writer favors putting the stimulus money President-elect Obama has promised for infrastructure improvements into mass transit, an idea with which I heartily agree.

This problem with the automobile is not new. Some of us have been ranting about it since the early 70's. I spent many years without a car or truck and believe me, it was quite difficult to do anything. Many of the places I lived, like Truckee, California, were devoid of a bus system and you couldn't ride a bicycle for several months out of the year because of the snow. If you wanted to go to the store to buy food, you had to have a backpack to carry it home, and then you had to leave it at the front of the store because the store managers were worried about theft. (Don't even get me started on how demeaning Amerikan business is to poor people or those who fit the young, disaffected, or "dirty-hippy" profile.) Clearly, the US is laid out on an automobile, rather than a human, scale. This is not right. What we need is what I have been advocating for almost 40 years - buses that run all the time, go everywhere, and are free.

Ten years ago, when I lived in Vancouver, Washington, I went to some meetings on mass transit, as Clark County was toying with the idea of providing free bus service. At the time, it was recognized that farebox revenue was just a fraction of operating expenses and by dropping the farebox altogether, only a small extra revenue stream was needed. This extra revenue could have been accommodated by a $.003 increase in the tax rate - in other words, an extra 30 cents on $100 of taxable sales. This should have been a no-brainer and there was actually serious discussion on this issue. What eventually sunk the proposal was the fear that the homeless would be able to travel anywhere in Vancouver for free! Can you imagine this? How hypocritical, not to mention stupid! Once again, it was the triumph of short-term nastiness over long-term community focus. I never did like living in Vancouver, as it was a hotbed of right-wing Christian fundamentalists, but this really showed how petty and small-minded the county government really was. I am glad I don't live there anymore.

Recently I came across an article (I forget where at the moment) that actually penciled out the cost of providing free bus service. Supposedly, the usual subsidies for buses across the US is 23% of operating costs, but you could save 20% on maintenance, driver productivity, and loading times by not having a farebox on the bus at all. Once again, this is a no-brainer. We really need a massive re-orientation towards mass transit. I favor buses - the usual light rail projects I read about are just boondoggles. Buses are available right now and are a short-term solution that has long-term potentialities.

We Are Beyond Organic

2008-10-23T21:45:00.000-07:00

OK - Here goes. Our farm is called F.A. Farm and the F.A. stands for Full Attention. It also stands for Fresh, Absolutely or any of a dozen other phrases. We produce sustainably-grown fruits and vegetables for sale and are also moving into sustainable grain production. What I mean by sustainable is basically "beyond organic." All of us farmers are on the same continuum, since we are producing new wealth in the form of food. However, some of us use very little petroleum-based products, while others use massive amounts, whether it is in the form of embedded calories in equipment, massive quantities of diesel, or chemical fertilizers. Yet I also use petroleum products when I put gas in my tiller and drive my pickup to the farmers market to sell my produce. We can't be pure, but we can reduce our carbon calorie usage by a considerable amount. Thus, the idea of being on the same continuum. I am more sustainable than my neighbors, but it is not an either-or proposition.